UC Santa Barbara

Detection of the extremely faint B-mode polarization pattern in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), imprinted from a stochastic background of gravitational waves left over from the proposed inflationary era in the early universe, has become a leading goal of the CMB community. Essential to this question is a more sophisticatedunderstanding of the obscuring galactic foreground emission. Recent Planck results have shown that higher frequency measurements (above 100 GHz) are more contaminated by complicated thermal dust emission than anticipated. Meanwhile, lower frequency measurements where synchrotron dominates is less well measured and is critical to effective foreground removal techniques. Polaris, described in this dissertation, measures the polarized synchrotron component at 10 GHz. Funding was supplied by the Niels Bohr Institute and Villum foundation to be the first cosmological or astrophysical experiment to deploy to Summit Station, Greenland. Polaris was successfully operated at Summit Station for seven weeks starting in June 2018, and shipped back to California in August 2018, where the remainder of telescope maintenance, characterization, and observations were conducted. This thesis describes the results of these measurements, their implications, and the needed future improvements for more comprehensive surveys.