Fabrication of a monolithic 5  m aluminum reflector for millimeter-wavelength observations of the cosmic microwave background

We have demonstrated the fabrication of a monolithic, 5 m diameter, aluminum reflector with 17.4 µm root-mean-square surface error. The reflector was designed to avoid the problem of pickup due to scattering from panel gaps in a large, millimeter-wavelength telescope that will be used for measurements of the cosmic microwave background.