QUBIC VI: cryogenic half wave plate rotator, design and performances
  Inflation Gravity Waves B-Modes polarization detection is the ultimate goal
of modern large angular scale cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments
around the world. A big effort is undergoing with the deployment of many
ground-based, balloon-borne and satellite experiments using different methods
to separate this faint polarized component from the incoming radiation. One of
the largely used technique is the Stokes Polarimetry that uses a rotating
half-wave plate (HWP) and a linear polarizer to separate and modulate the
polarization components with low residual cross-polarization. This paper
describes the QUBIC Stokes Polarimeter highlighting its design features and its
performances. A common systematic with these devices is the generation of large
spurious signals synchronous with the rotation and proportional to the
emissivity of the optical elements. A key feature of the QUBIC Stokes
Polarimeter is to operate at cryogenic temperature in order to minimize this
unwanted component. Moving efficiently this large optical element at low
temperature constitutes a big engineering challenge in order to reduce friction
power dissipation. Big attention has been given during the designing phase to
minimize the differential thermal contractions between parts. The rotation is
driven by a stepper motor placed outside the cryostat to avoid thermal load
dissipation at cryogenic temperature. The tests and the results presented in
this work show that the QUBIC polarimeter can easily achieve a precision below
0.1{\deg} in positioning simply using the stepper motor precision and the
optical absolute encoder. The rotation induces only few mK of extra power load
on the second cryogenic stage (~ 8 K).
