The Advanced Telescope for High ENergy Astrophysics (ATHENA) will include the X-ray Integral Field Unit instrument (X-IFU). This instrument is baselined with an array of 3,168 transition-edge sensor (TES) pixels made with Mo/Au bilayers that will be AC biased and Frequency-Division Mutliplexed (FDM). Over the last few years, there has been intense effort at NASA/GSFC and SRON to better...
At SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, we are developing X-ray microcalorimeters as backup option for the baseline detectors in the X-IFU instrument on board of the ATHENA space mission led by ESA and to be launched in the early 2030s.
New, mixed 5X5 TiAu Transition Edge Sensor (TES) arrays where TESs have different high aspect ratios and high resistance have been fabricated to meet...
Intense development of nanobolometers has taken place for well more than a decade with the aim to reach noise equivalent power NEP = 10e-20 W/rtHz. Furthermore, observation of single photons at increasingly long wavelengths is a long-standing effort. We present a microwave nanobolometer based on superconductor/normal-metal/superconductor Josephson junctions. Using positive electrothermal...
After more than 15 years of development, the technical maturity of MKIDs has greatly improved. Array level demonstrations of imagers and spectrometers now exist, measuring a wide coverage of frequencies, and with multiple optical coupling schemes. However, several different technical challenges must be overcome before MKIDs reach the point where they become a general solution for the full...
In this talk, I will present how we combine spectroscopy and imaging capabilities inside one compact device for submillimeter observations. This system is an interferometric system that has been designed to fulfill the spectroscopic requirements of a space mission. The idea is to bring a Fabry-Pérot spectrometer very close to the detector (silicon bolometers) such that they form a coupled,...
Arrays of lumped-element kinetic inductance detectors (LEKIDs) optically coupled through an antenna and transmission-line structure are a promising candidate for future cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. Using the separated architecture of a LEKID enables optical coupling to be realised, without the detector becoming susceptible to two-level system noise created by the...
The kinetic inductance detector (KID) offers an elegant and convenient solution to building large-format arrays operating at mm-wavelengths. Scaling alternative technology to the large detector counts required for future experiments requires auxiliary multiplexing components that can significantly increase the complexity and cost. Arrays of KIDs require no additional cryogenic multiplexing...
Real-time video rate imaging and automatic recognition of threats and contraband items that were concealed beneath layers of clothing on moving passengers was recently demonstrated with a prototype passive sub-mm imaging system at Cardiff Airport in the UK. The passengers did not have to divest their outer clothing layers and the instrument was able to distinguish between threat and non-threat...
We report on the development of commercially fabricated multi-chroic antenna coupled Transition Edge Sensor (TES) bolometer arrays for Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarimetry experiments. The orders of magnitude increase in detector count for next generation CMB experiments require a new approach in detector wafer production to increase fabrication throughput.
We describe collaborative...
The dark matter problem has accompanied cosmologist and particle physicist for more than 80 years. Nowadays we have an extremely accurate model of our Universe, but still most of its content eludes our observation. Grasping the nature of this missing matter is of compelling necessity for our understanding. Direct searches aim to detect dark matter particles with Earth-bound detectors....
We have designed and tested a large area 11-gram photon detector with 45 cm$^2$ surface area and 3.9 eV energy resolution, employing a TES-based readout on a Si absorber. With a 20 $\mu$s rise time due to the fast collection of athermal phonons, this device significantly surpasses both timing and energy resolution requirements of future neutrinoless double beta decay experiments.
Though not...
CRESST (Cryogenic Rare Events Search with Superconducting Thermometers) is a long-standing experiment with cryogenic detectors located at the underground facility Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy. CRESST-III, the third CRESST experiment generation, is designed to probe the spin-independent Dark Matter(DM)-nucleus cross-section with a world leading sensitivity for low DM particle...
This talk will give an overview of the cryogenic detector for the most sensitive experiment to probe the QCD axion to date, Axion Dark Matter eXperiment, (ADMX). The detector technology includes a dilution refrigerator operated at 90mK and quantum-noise-limited amplifiers which contribute minimally to the system noise temperature thereby increasing the experimental sensitivity to the QCD...
Today microwave SQUID multiplexing appears to be the most suitable cryogenic multiplexing technique for reading out large-scale detector arrays based on metallic magnetic calorimeters. Here, each detector is read out by a non-hysteretic, unshunted rf-SQUID that is inductively coupled to a superconducting microwave resonator with unique resonance frequency. Due to the magnetic flux dependence...
We are developing the frequency domain multiplexing (FDM) read-out of transition-edge sensor (TES) microcalorimeters for the X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) instrument on board of the future European X-Ray observatory Athena. The X-IFU instrument consists of an array of $\sim$3000 TESs with a high quantum efficiency (>90 % at 7 keV) and spectral resolution $\Delta E$=2.5 eV @ 7 keV...
Superconducting Nanostrip Single-Photon Detectors (SNSPDs) are promising devices in many fields ranging from single-photon source characterization to optical communication and quantum cryptography. An important feature of SNSPDs is their low dark count rate (DCR), that increases close to the critical current where the detection efficiency is higher. In such a region DCR is dominated by a...
In recent years, the development of fast and low-dark-count single-photon detectors for photonic quantum information applications promise a radical improvement in our capacity to search for dark matter. The advent of superconducting nanowire detectors, which have fewer than 10 dark counts per day and have demonstrated sensitivity from the mid-infrared to the ultraviolet wavelength band,...
The Quantum Capacitance Detector (QCD) is a new high-sensitivity direct detector under development for low background applications such as far-infrared spectroscopy from a cold space telescope. The QCD has demonstrated an optically-measured noise equivalent power of 2x10-20 W Hz-1/2 at 1.5THz, making it among the most sensitive far-IR detectors systems ever demonstrated, and meeting the...
Quantum information technology has turned to be a bullet train supported by many countries (EU, USA, UK, JP and CN). The quantum information process (QIP) involves quantum sources, quantum manipulation tools as well as quantum detectors. Since the photon (of visible and near infrared wavelengths) is one of the most popular quanta to play, single photon detectors (SPDs) play an irreplaceable...
Granular aluminum is an intriguing superconducting material, which has recently been receiving increasing attention in the superconducting quantum bits (qubits) and detectors communities. Among its key features are a tunable kinetic inductance up to nH/sq, amenable nonlinearity, and low microwave frequency losses [1,2,3]. Furthermore, quasiparticle relaxation times on the order of ~s have been...
Superconducting single-photon detectors have become the preferred technology for applications that require high detection efficiency, ultrafast timing performance and low noise for wide spectral sensitivity spanning UV to IR spectrum. The wide range of applications such as fundamental tests of quantum mechanics, fluorescence microscopy, optical communication and quantum computing, also...
Silicon carbide (SiC) is among the most promising optical material for the realization of classical and quantum photonics, due to the simultaneous presence of quantum emitters and a non-centrosymmetric crystal structure. In recent years, progress have been made in the development of SiC integrated optical components making this a mature platform for the implementation of quantum experiments on...
Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KIDs) carry the promise of a truly scalable detector solution, capable of filling the ambitiously large and densely populated focal planes envisioned for future sub-millimeter and millimeter-wave instruments. As part of our effort to realize their full potential, we have developed and fabricated the first kilopixel-scale arrays of KIDs on 150 mm diameter silicon...
The inflationary scenario generically predicts the existence of primordial gravitational waves, though over a wide range of amplitudes from slow-roll to multi-field models. The presence of these tensor perturbations at the last scattering surface imprinted the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization with a unique parity-odd “B-mode” pattern at 1-degree angular scale. The BICEP/Keck (BK)...
Large low temperature detectors are widely used in nuclear and particle physics, from Dark Matter Searches to Double Beta Decay and, more generally, in rare event searches.
The ability to construct large calorimeters from a wide variety of materials is one of the important advantages of this technology.
The possibility - in addition to the heat- to use a second readout channel (scintillation...
The advanced Mo-based rare process experiment (AMoRE) is an international project to search for neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) of 100Mo using a large-scale low temperature detector. The project employs scintillating molybdate crystals for high-resolution detection of phonon and scintillation signals with MMC readouts at mK temperatures. AMoRE-II, the second phase of the project, is...
The CUORE cryostat is today’s largest and most powerful dilution refrigerator in the world. Thanks to its cryogenic performance, CUORE is the first bolometric experiment that has been able to reach the one-ton scale. The CUORE cryostat provides up to 6 µW at 10 mK and can cool down to 6.9 mK a mass of about 1.5 ton in a 4 weeks timescale. By offering an experimental volume of 1 m$^3$ and by...
Neutrinos continue to be a source of scientific wonder in nuclear physics, particle physics, and cosmology. Although much has been learned about the properties of neutrinos, much still pleads for more experimental investigation. The measurement of Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering (CENNS) has been a holy grail in neutrino physics since its prediction almost 40 years ago, and has now...
The NUCLEUS experiment aims for the detection of coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering at a nuclear power reactor with gram-scale, ultra-low threshold cryogenic detectors. This technology leads to a miniaturization of neutrino detectors and allows to probe physics beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
We present results from a 0.5g prototype detector, operated above ground, which...
The goal of the Electron Capture in $^{163}$Ho (ECHo) experiment is the determination of the electron neutrino mass by the analysis of the electron capture spectrum of $^{163}$Ho. The detector technology is based on metallic magnetic calorimeters operated at cryogenic temperature in a reduced background environment. For the first phase of the experiment, ECHo-1k, the detector production has...
Thanks to the continuous advances in nanofabrication the size of superconducting detector arrays, such as those based on TESs or KIDs, is approaching ~ 10^5 – 10^6 sensors, which is driven by the need to provide faster and more sensitive systems. To access the signals from these arrays, suitable technologies are needed to amplify and multiplex the signals at the cold stage to reduce the...
Arrays of superconducting resonators are used for astronomical imaging, polarimetry and spectroscopy as well as in other areas requiring sensitive metrology such as quantum sensing and computation. The low loss of superconducting components enables large numbers of these resonators to be read out using frequency division multiplexing (FDM). I will discuss the system requirements and...
During the last decade, CEA have started a long term program to achieve the collective realization of a large (32x32 pixels) µCalorimeters camera for X-ray Astrophysics. This camera is based on silicon doped sensors with Composite Tantalum absorber readout thanks to HEMT/SiGe based Cryo-Electronics. The goal of this development is to achieve a spectral resolution of about 2eV@6keV with a...
The SAFARI instrument is a diffraction grating and FTS spectrometer on board the SPICA space observatory, designed to achieve the highest-ever sensitivity for line emission in a wide far-infrared band. It will employ sensitive TES (Transition Edge Sensor) bolometer arrays with nearly 4000 pixels with an NEP of 0.2 aW/√Hz.
Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM) will be used to read out these...
A tin cryogenic bolometer detector, TIN.TIN (The INdia based TIN detector), is being developed to study neutrinoless double beta decay in 124Sn [1]. The detector uses a NTD Ge sensor, cooled to 10 mK in a Cryogen Free Dilution Refrigerator [2]. The change in temperature of the absorber due to any incident photon/charged particle is detected by the sensor and the electrical signal is amplified...
JPL has developed a flexible radio-frequency readout system suitable for a variety of superconducting detectors commonly used in millimeter and sub-millimeter astrophysics, including Kinetic Inductance detectors (KIDs), Thermal KID bolometers (TKIDs), and Quantum Capacitance Detectors (QCDs). Our system avoids custom FPGA-based readouts in favor of commercially available software defined radio...
The 60 keV transition in Am-241 decay is one of the most important calibration standards for low energy gamma-rays. The current literature value of 59.5409(1) keV is based on measurements with high-purity Ge detectors and a Tb-161 reference source in 1993, and its 0.1 eV uncertainty gives it significant weight for cryogenic detector calibration. We have re-measured the energy of this...
The LUMINEU project has recently set up a technology for the development of high-performance radiopure 100Mo-containing scintillating bolometers, realized in the framework of the R&D activities towards the proposed tonne-scale neutrinoless double-beta decay experiment CUPID aiming at utilization of the existing CUORE infrastructure. Using in particular 100Mo-enriched Li2MoO4 cryogenic...
As the size and scale of low temperature detector arrays continue to grow, the demands on the cryogenic multiplexing has dramatically increased. The microwave SQUID multiplexer is meant to address this issue by opening the possibility of multiple gigahertz of readout bandwidth per coax pair. With this readout technique, complexity is moved from the cryogenic stages to the room temperature...
For high-energy particle detection, we investigated two materials: niobium and a high-temperature superconductor, YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_{7-\delta}$. Lumped element kinetic inductance detectors are fabricated with the both superconductors. The both devices detected the alpha line (5.4 MeV) radiated from $^{241}$Am source at 1 K. The energy resolution of the Nb-base detectors was approximately 0.6 MeV...
We report on a new development effort to achieve an array of ultra-sensitive (NEP < 1E-20 W/sqrt(Hz)) far-IR detectors for applications in spectrometers on Origins Space Telescope (OST) or similar low-background platforms. The detector uses a submicron-size hot-electron bolometer (HEB) sensor made from normal metal (non-superconducting Ti) coupled to a planar microantenna. The detector does...
Neutrinos play a crucial role in the Standard Model of particle physics, but also in Astrophysics.
The evolution of a massive star strongly depends on the properties of these particles, especially in Supernova explosions. On this subject very few information are available concerning their production, absorption, and scattering processes and elementary aspects of neutrino transport in dense...
Superconducting-insulating-superconducting (SIS) trilayers have been produced for Josephson Junction fabrication by thermal atomic layer deposition (ALD) processes. The trilayers are composed of alternating layers of Ti0.4N0.6/Al2O3/ Ti0.4N0.6, deposited at 450°C, in a thermal ALD reactor on Al2O3-coated silicon. The conformal nature of the ALD process provides excellent step coverage of...
Niobium nitride (NbN) is a useful material for fabricating detectors because of its high critical temperature and relatively high kinetic inductance. In particular, NbN can be used to fabricate nanowire detectors and mm-wave transmission lines. When deposited, NbN is usually sputtered, leaving room for concern about uniformity at small thicknesses. We present Atomic Layer Deposition niobium...
Future x-ray astrophysics experiments require high-fill-factor kilo-pixel arrays of transition-edge sensors (TESs), with very high spectral resolution over a broad range of energies (typically 0.1-12 keV). In this paper we report on Mo/Au TES designs that are being optimized to meet the stringent resolution, count-rate and uniformity requirements of this next generation of space-based...
CCAT-prime is a new 6 m crossed Dragone telescope designed to characterize the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization and foregrounds, measure the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effects of galaxy clusters, map the [CII] emission intensity from the Epoch of Reionization (EoR), and probe star formation and the dynamics of the interstellar medium in Milky Way and nearby galaxies. CCAT-prime will make...
Transition Edge Sensors (TESs) are used as very sensitive thermometers in microcalorimeters aimed at different wavelengths detection. In particular, for soft X-ray astrophysics, science goals require very high resolution microcalorimeters which can be achieved with TESs coupled to suitable absorbers. For many applications there is also need for a high number of pixels which need to be...
Advanced ACTPol is the second generation polarization-sensitive upgrade to the 6m aperture Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), which increased detector count and frequency coverage compared to the previous ACTPol receiver. Advanced ACTpol utilizes a new two-stage time-division multiplexing readout architecture based on superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) to achieve a...
The Simons Observatory is building both large (6m) and small (0.42m) aperture telescopes in the Atacama desert in Chile to observe the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation with unprecedented sensitivity. Simons Observatory telescopes in total will use over 60,000 transition edge sensor (TES) detectors spanning frequencies between 27 and 270 GHz and operating near 100mK.
TES devices have...
X-ray emission from charge exchange between highly-charged ions and neutral atoms forms a significant portion of the emissions from galactic outflows and stellar winds and is an important source of soft X-ray emission in our Solar system. Theoretical modeling of the velocity-dependent partial cross sections for X-ray line emission in charge exchange has so far proven difficult. High-resolution...
Implemented at nuclear facilities, ultra-high-resolution microcalorimeter gamma spectroscopy offers important capabilities for advanced nuclear fuel cycle safeguards. Our goal is to reduce the performance gap between nondestructive and destructive isotopic analysis methods. The improved energy resolution of microcalorimeters can reduce uncertainty in nondestructive isotopic composition...
The technology for low-power sub-Kelvin cooling is is now established and products are available that offer simple operation, with reliable and repeatable performance at relatively low cost. Self-contained, sealed sub-Kelvin modules can be added-on or retro-fitted to low-power mechanical (GM or PT) pre-coolers to extend their operating temperature downwards, from 4K into the sub-Kelvin range....
The cryogenic systems is becoming vital in R&D activities in many fields ranging from cooled detector integrated electronics to quantum computing systems. Although CMOS technology has been widely studied, current models do not consider transistor behavior at ultra-low temperatures. Developing the necessary instrumentation to characterize transistor structures fabricated in CMOS commercial...
We have been developing position-sensitive detectors, most recently for the proposed Lynx X-ray observatory currently under study for the next 2020 decadal survey. These detectors, referred to as hydras, are composed of multiple absorbers connected to a single transition-edge sensor (TES), each with a different thermal conductance. Using this technique as a form of thermal multiplexing allows...
Direct-current superconducting quantum interference devices (dc-SQUIDs) are among the most sensitive wideband devices for measuring any physical quantity that can be naturally converted into magnetic flux. Therefore, they are ideally suited, for example, for reading out cryogenic particle detectors such as transition edge sensors or metallic magnetic calorimeters. However, SQUIDs are...
LiteBIRD is a proposed JAXA satellite mission to measure the CMB B-mode polarization with unprecedented sensitivity ($\sigma_r \sim 0.001$). To achieve this goal, $\sim 4000$ state-of-the-art TES bolometers will observe the whole sky for 3 years from L2. These detectors, as well as the SQUID readout, are extremely susceptible to EMI and other instrumental disturbances e.g. static magnetic...
Silicon bolometers feature a remarkably high sensitivity when cooled at very low. These devices can be used as polarization sensitive detectors in the field of millimetre-wave radiation imaging and polarimetry, typically in the range 200 to 500 GHz. The radiation absorption is based on Ti/TiN superconducting thin films with an adapted critical superconducting transition temperature (Tc) for...
The DESHIMA instrument is a wideband submillimeter spectrometer based on a single NbTiN superconducting chip, which is integrated with a dispersive filterbank and Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) sensor array. For the next campaign at the ASTE telescope in Chile, DESHIMA is expected to have an instantaneous bandwidth from 220-440 GHz with 347 channels, achieving a resolution...
The response of high-resolution detectors to a short-pulse laser consists of a set of equidistant peaks corresponding to integer numbers of absorbed photons that follow Poisson statistics. Since the laser has a negligible intrinsic line width, the peaks can be used for detailed characterization of the detector and the data acquisition system. We have characterized superconducting tunnel...
LiteBIRD is a satellite mission designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background and cosmic foregrounds from 34 to 448 GHz. This experiment aims to measure primordially generated B-mode polarization at large angular scales and will generate a dataset capable of probing many scientific inquiries such as the sum of neutrino masses. The experiment will have three optical...
Micro-X is a sounding rocket borne instrument that uses a Transition Edge Sensor microcalorimeter array to perform high-resolution spectroscopy in the X-ray band. This instrument flew for the first time on July 22nd, 2018 from White Sands, New Mexico. An internal calibration source is used to compare data taken during pre-flight integration, flight, and after the successful post-flight...
TolTEC is an upcoming multiwavelength imaging polarimeter designed to fill the focal plane of the 50-m diameter Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT). Combined with the LMT, TolTEC will offer high angular resolution (5”-10”) simultaneous, polarization-sensitive observations in three wavelengths: 1.1, 1.4, and 2.0 mm. Additionally, TolTEC will feature mapping speeds greater than 2...
The forthcoming generation of Cosmic Microwave Background polarization observatories are developing large format detector arrays which will operate at 100 mK. Given the volume of detector wafers that will be required, fast-cooldown 100 mK test cryostats are increasingly needed. A miniature dilution refrigerator (MDR) has been developed for this purpose and is reported. The MDR is pre-cooled by...
New fully integrated digital signal processing technology called Radio
Frequency System on a Chip (RFSoC) developed for communications and
defense applications will set the standard for future astronomical
instruments which utilize superconducting arrays of kinetic inductance
detectors (KID), Transition edge sensors (TES), and nanowire single
photon detectors (SNSPD). The RFSoC combines a...
Athena is a future X-ray observatory led by ESA, to be launched in the early 2030s. The X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) instrument on-board Athena provides spatially-resolved high resolution spectroscopy of 2.5 eV with a large array of Transition Edge Sensor (TES) microcalorimeters. The main sensor is a MoAu bi-layer TES array provided by NASA-Goddard. Pixels are read out with a...
High-resolution X-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) can offer element-specific insight into the oxidation state and chemical environment of a compound through energy shifts in emission peaks and their minor satellites. Compared to X-ray absorption spectroscopy, emission spectroscopy is less developed from both a theoretical and practical standpoint, and the ≲ 1 eV shifts demand detectors with...
We are developing Position-Sensitive Transition-edge sensor (TES) microcalorimeters (PoSTs) to detect gamma-rays up to a few MeV. Each PoST consists of a long absorber with a TES on each end of the absorber and works as a one-dimensional imaging spectrometer. We fabricated PoSTs with 0.5 mm x 0.5 mm x 18.8 mm lead absorbers and TESs with transition temperature of 171 mK. We irradiated the...
We are challenging to measure gamma rays in the high energy band of 200 keV-2 MeV.For this purpose, our gamma-ray transition-edge-sensor (TES) microcalorimeters have a large absorber (1mm×1mm×1mm). For mechanical robustness and fast decay time, the membrane of our gamma-ray TES microcalorimeters are made of silicon and at present ten times thicker than those of X-ray TES microcalorimeters....
LiteBIRD is a cosmic microwave background polarization experiment with the goal of measuring the tensor-to-scalar ratio with a total uncertainty of $\delta r$ < 0.001. It will survey the full sky for three years in 15 frequency bands spanning 34 to 448 GHz. We are developing detector arrays for the six lowest frequency bands, 34 to 99 GHz. The arrays are populated with lenslet-coupled sinuous...
The Electron Capture in $^{163}$Ho (ECHo) collaboration plans to reach sub-eV sensitivity level on the effective electron neutrino mass by the analysis of a high energy resolution and high statistics electron capture spectrum of $^{163}$Ho. Large arrays, of the order of 100 pixels each, of metallic magnetic calorimeters (MMCs) with enclosed $^{163}$Ho, read out utilizing microwave SQUID...
We have developed Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors suitable for near-IR single photon counting. Our films are made of titanium and titanium nitride, deposited in a multi-layer structure Ti/TiN/Ti/TiN with a total thickness of 44 nm. The film has a transition temperature of 1.2 K and a surface kinetic inductance of 34 pH/sq. The resonator was designed with lumped elements and consists of...
In the search for rare events, a simultaneous measurement of photons and phonons produced after an event in a scintillating crystal operated at mK temperatures enables an efficient background rejection. This is due to the fact that the light yield depends on the mass, allowing for particle discrimination. This approach can be used for both neutrinoless double beta decay and dark matter...
We report on the recent progress in Neganov–Luke light detector (NLLD) development. The electrodes to generate electric field for Neganov-Luke phonon amplification is configured in a pair of comb-shaped Al electrodes fabricated on one side of a silicon wafer served as a light absorber. A metallic magnetic calorimeter (MMC) is adopted to measure the temperature increase of the absorber wafer....
We are currently building a transition-edge sensor (TES) X-ray spectrometer for the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory for energies less than 20 keV in collaboration with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The spectrometer consists of application specific TES sensors for pilot X-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) and X-ray absorption fine structure (XAFS)...
We propose to use high-purity lab-grown diamond for the detection of sub-GeV dark matter. Diamond targets can be sensitive to both nuclear and electron recoils from dark matter scattering in the MeV and above mass range, as well as to absorption processes of dark matter with masses between sub-eV to 10's of eV.
Compared to other proposed semiconducting targets such as germanium and silicon,...
Low-temperature calorimeters (or phonon detectors) have proven to be great detectors to search for rare processes like neutrinoless double beta decay and dark matter interactions. While the massive calorimeters used in the aforementioned searches can achieve excellent energy resolution, their sensitivity is limited by the background radioactivity. One technique to enable event-by-event...
Microwave multiplexing has become a key technology for reading out large arrays of x-ray and gamma ray microcalorimeters with mux factors of 100 or more. However, the desire for large mux factors and fast x-ray pulses for high photon counting rates drives system design towards high sensor current slew rate, which is typically handled by using a high sampling rate. Future experiments like the...
The high spectral resolution detection of hard X-rays (E > 20 keV) is a challenging and nearly unexplored area in Space Astrophysics.
Traditionally used CdTe/CdZnTe semiconductor based hard x-ray detectors present moderate spectral resolution (several hundred eV @ 60 keV), while a resolution of few tens of eV could open new frontiers in the study of nuclear processes and high temperature...
Absorber is a key element for superconducting transition edge X-ray detectors. We fabricated thick gold absorber with an overhanging structure. A Ti/Au seed layer was made by magnetron-sputtering deposition, and then several micrometers-thick gold absorber was made by electroplating. The resistivity of the gold absorber was determined from four-terminal measurements. The absorber was...
We have been developing Superconductor-Insulator-Superconductor (SIS) mixer integrated circuits (ICs) for highly compact multi-beam heterodyne receivers. The distinctive feature of the SIS mixer ICs is the incorporation of membrane-supported waveguide probes for signal and local oscillator coupling. This idea makes it possible to compactly accommodate many pixels on the focal plane and to...
Photon counting detectors for terahertz frequencies will open new frontiers in terahertz astronomy by measuring photon statistics and applying to intensity interferometry. To count large number of terahertz photons, we work on SIS (or STJ) photon detectors. In this presentation we discuss the readout cryogenic electronics with GHz bandwidth made of semiconductor circuits for the SIS photon...
Many applications in astronomy from tens of GHz to THz frequencies, such as CMB polarization studies and Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect observations, would benefit from low loss and wide bandwidth optics. Silicon is an excellent material for optics within this frequency range because of its high refractive index, achromaticity, lack of birefringence, low loss, high thermal conductivity, and...
SuperSpec is an on-chip filter-bank spectrometer designed for wideband moderate-resolution spectroscopy at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, employing TiN kinetic inductance detectors. SuperSpec technology will enable integral-field-unit spectrometers suitable for high-redshift line intensity mapping or multi-object spectrographs. We plan to deploy a demonstration instrument to the...
For quasi-optical elements in the millimeter and sub- millimeter range, silicon is an interesting material. Its high refractive index facilitates the production of compact and lightweight elements. Moreover, its thermal conductivity allows better thermalisation at cryogenic temperatures, and the loss tangent of bulk high-resistivity silicon (tan δ < 10- 4) is without competition.
Silicon is...
We present HeRALD (Helium Roton Apparatus for Light Dark matter), a new detector concept using superfluid helium as the target material for sub GeV dark matter nuclear recoil. Helium, in its superfluid state, promises a good kinematic matching to low mass dark matter with several channels for reading out nuclear recoils. The main idea of this detector design is that superfluid helium allows...
A novel triggering function developed for 240 pixel Transition-Edge Sensors is demonstrated under the high rate of particle background. The function is integrated into the standard data acquisition system in the NIST TES framework. It enables any type of combination of trigger pattern when a pixel is triggered, which is called ``group trigger''. As a practical implementation, the primary...
Large spectro-imagers for X-ray astronomy are highly needed. Consisting in micro-calorimeter arrays, technologies used for thermometers are based either on superconductor (TES) or metal-insulator (MIS, or Si-doped sensors) transitions. MIS are a good choice for their easy operability with classical electronics. TES allow high sensibilities detectors for the price of a complex multiplexing...
In this proceeding we will describe the effort made in our group to address the problem of the beam characterization of a small aperture telescope with wide field of view in the microwave band between 90 and 300GHz. We will describe the case of Transition Edge Sensors (TES), baseline choice for upcoming ground Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments such as the Small Aperture Telescope...
In China, HUBS is being proposed as a major X-ray mission for the next decade. It is designed to effectively probe hot gas in the circumgalactic and intergalactic space and thus to address the long-standing issue of "missing" baryons in the local universe. The hot gas is expected to produce only weak emission in soft X-rays, due to its low density, making it technically difficult to detect. On...
We discuss the improvements in wide energy range, energy dispersive X-ray emission spectroscopy in the particle induced mode (PIXE) achieved by optical focusing of X-rays to high-energy resolution superconducting transition-edge sensor arrays. TES-PIXE technique offers great energy resolution for multi-element samples consisting of even hundreds of X-ray peaks with nearly overlapping energies...
We present an interdigitated capacitor trimming technique for fine-tuning the resonance frequency of superconducting microresonators and increasing the multiplexing factor. We first measure the optical response of the array with a beam mapping system to link all resonances to their physical resonators. Then a new set of resonance frequencies with uniform spacing and higher multiplexing factor...
Narrowband parametric amplifiers with superconducting (SC) thin films on planar transmission lines have been realised by numerous groups. These paramps rely on resonators with non-linear elements within them to allow for harmonic generation that gives rise to signal gain when certain conditions are satisfied. Such params, however, have not yet been realised in SC circular and rectangular...
Intensive submm-wave continuum imaging of the sky has discovered several high-redshift ultra-luminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs), and follow up spectroscopic measurements have partially resolved their redshift distribution. But much of the dust-obscured galaxy formation in the early universe is traced by much less bright infrared galaxies, which are hard to detect using classical imaging...
Future low mass Dark Matter searches will require sensitivity to single optical phonons, corresponding to thresholds of about 100meV. This motivates the design of sensors with relatively large areas, and excellent energy resolution.
In this talk I will discuss the performance of a $100\mu\mathrm{m}\times 400\mu\mathrm{m}$ Tungsten Transition Edge Sensor (TES) with a $T_c$ of 40mK. This device...
In dark matter direct-detection experiments, the detection limits of most detectors are confined with the backgrounds originating from coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering. One of the possible methods to break the neutrino background floor is a use of the directional dependence of detector response. We employed ZnWO4 crystals as an anisotropic target material for the simultaneous detection of...
The International Axion Observatory (IAXO) is searching for axions or axion-like particles generated in the Sun. A large magnetic field is used to convert solar axions to photons via the Primakoff effect. The major part of the expected spectrum considering only axion-photon coupling covers an energy range up to 10 keV with its maximum at about 3 keV. X-ray detectors with high efficiency in...
The µ-Spec integrated spectrometer operating at ~500 GHz, employs thin film superconducting Nb microstrip transmission lines deposited directly on a thin (450 nm) single-crystal silicon dielectric. This single-crystal silicon layer is chosen as the dielectric layer due to its low intrinsic loss, with the goal of achieving both high-efficiency and precise phase control in a compact spectrometer...
CUORE (Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events) is a tonne-scale cryogenic detector located at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso exploiting bolometric technique to search for neutrinoless double beta decay of 130Te. The experimental signature is a sharp peak at the Q value of the decay in the summed energy spectrum of the electrons emitted.
Thanks to its very low background and...
Transmission line losses at sub-mm wavelengths present a significant challenge for highly integrated superconducting circuits, such as on-chip spectrometers, multi-color/dual polarization detectors for measurements of the CMB or phased array antennas. In the case of on-chip spectrometers like DESHIMA or SuperSpec, an internal loss better than $\tan^{-1}\delta = Qi \sim 10^4$ is required to...
Accurate decay data on radioactive nuclides are necessary for many fields of science and technology, ranging from medicine and particle physics to metrology. However, data that are in use today are mostly based on measurements or theoretical calculations that are rather old. Recent measurements with cryogenic detectors and other methods show in some cases significant discrepancies to both...
Heavy ion beam is used in radiotherapy for cancer. Unlike in other radiation therapies, direct ionization plays a large roll in heavy ion therapy. It is considered that the secondary electrons emitted in the minute area around the track of a heavy ion beam plays a roll in the direct ionization, which has not been quantitatively evaluated yet. In order to ultimately detect the energy transfer...
HOLMES is an experiment aiming at pushing down the sensitivity on the smallest neutrino mass at the order of ∼ eV performing a calorimetric measurement of the Electron Capture decay spectrum of 163Ho. For reaching its goal, HOLMES will deploy an array of 1000 microcalorimeters based on Transition Edge Sensors with gold absorbers in which the 163Ho will be ion implanted. A major challenge is...
The MOCCA detector is a high-resolution, large-area molecule camera based on metallic magnetic calorimeters and read out with SQUIDs. Its array of 64 × 64 quadratic pixels with a side length of 700µm covers a total detection area of over 4.5cm × 4.5cm with a filling factor of 99.5%. It will be deployed at the Cryogenic Storage Ring CSR at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in...
Future instruments employing cryogenic detectors for millimeter and submillimeter astronomy applications can benefit greatly from silicon vacuum windows with broadband antireflection treatment. Silicon is an ideal optical material at these wavelengths due to numerous attractive properties, including low loss, high refractive index, and high strength. However, its high index ($n=3.4$)...
Nanoscale phononic crystals (PnC) are promising components for several low temperature detector technologies, such as bolometers, transition edge sensors and kinetic inductance detectors (KID). Recent experimental and theoretical studies demonstrate a wide range of tunability for thermal properties of PnCs with correctly chosen geometry. [1-2] Low temperature applications of PnCs often rely on...
We report on the development of near-IR and optical parallel plate capacitor lumped-element kinetic inductance detectors (LEKIDs) for astronomical applications. The parallel-plate capacitor is made of a TiN base electrode, Al2O3 dielectric and Nb upper electrode. For a given frequency readout bandwidth, compared to the interdigitated capacitor geometry, the use of the parallel-plate capacitor...
The search for dark matter candidates using solid crystals operated at cryogenic temperatures, push towards a lower energy threshold at each development stages for the detectors. Consequently, new approaches for detector calibration at the proposed energy scales are necessary. In the case of SuperCDMS SNOLAB, energy thresholds in the range of few eVs are expected. In this talk, we are...
The Northwestern EXperimental Underground Site at Fermilab (NEXUS@FNAL) is an underground cryogenic facility that has 300 meter water equivalent shielding. A dilution refrigerator operating at 10 mK, a DD generator producing 2.5 MeV neutrons, and a suite of optical and X-ray calibration sources are being deployed at the facility. The expected background level at NEXUS is 100 events/keV/kg/day....
CUORE is a ton-scale underground array of $988$ $\mathrm{TeO}_2$ crystals operated as bolometers at about $10 \: \mathrm{mK}$ in the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratories (LNGS). Its main scientific goal is searching for $0\nu\beta\beta$ decay of $^{130}\mathrm{Te}$. Each crystal is equipped with an NTD thermistor whose voltage is low-pass filtered, amplified and continuously digitized at a...
SPICA is one of the three projects competing for the ESA M5 mission. The three SPICA instruments share the focal plane of a 2.5 m diameter telescope cooled to 8 K, to achieve ultimate sensitivity measurements in the Far-IR and submm domains. The B-BOP camera, one of these instruments with unprecedented polarimetric capabilities, is mainly devoted to reveal the role of magnetic field in many...
We have prepared superconducting niobium nitride (NbN) films and NbN/AlN/NbN tunnel junctions to investigate the energy gaps by measuring the optical conductivity with time-domain terahertz spectroscopy and by tunneling spectroscopy, respectively. A 41-nm-thick NbN film was deposited on a 0.3-mm-thick single crystal MgO substrate by reactive dc magnetron sputtering. The critical temperature...
The BICEP/Keck experiment (BK) is a series of small-aperture refracting telescopes observing degree-scale Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization from the South Pole in search of a primordial B-mode signature. This B-mode signal arises from inflationary gravitational waves interacting with the CMB, and has amplitude parametrized by the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$. Since 2016, BICEP3...
Astronomy and astrophysics have been continuously seeking observing capabilities with higher angular resolution and better sensitivity. Fast photon detection would be one of the key technologies to advance the detector performance, which may improve the signal-to-noise ratio by resolving each photons, or may lead to photon statistics for high precision measurements in photon-counting mode. SIS...
The SuperCDMS collaboration has entered the construction phase for the upcoming SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment. By 2025 we will probe nuclear-recoil dark matter between 300 MeV and 10 GeV and electron recoil dark matter down to 500 keV with world-leading sensitivity. I will review the status and plans for the SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment, and discuss recent science results from surface dark matter...
Frequency division multiplexing (FDM) is a readout technique for transition edge sensor-based bolometer arrays used on telescopes including SPT-3G, POLARBEAR-2, and LiteBIRD. Here we present the latest progress and plans for development of a minimal-parasitic FDM architecture. This technology will enable ultra-large focal planes for future instruments such as CMB-S4. Reduced wiring length...
From extremely broadband functionality to easily scalable designs, self-similar antennas offer a strong set of benefits. With a four-arm layout, self-similar designs also become geometrically suited for dual-polarization through excitations of opposing arms. However, there has only been limited use of these devices for millimeter-wave detectors. One field for such antennas is the Cosmic...
Calorimetry of the absorbed energy in heavy ion is very effective for minimizing of the uncertainty in dose rate measurement. Therefore we have been developing the precision heavy charged particle detector applying the superconducting transition edge sensor (TES) coupled to a tin absorber. In LTD 17, we reported our first experimental result, in which we succeeded to detect the helium ions at...
MetroBeta is a European metrology research project aiming at the improvement of the knowledge of the shapes of beta spectra, both in terms of theoretical calculation and measurement. The most prominent experimental work package deals with the measurement of the spectrum shapes of several beta emitters by means of metallic magnetic calorimeters (MMCs) with the beta emitter embedded in the...
We are developing new focal plane arrangements of x-ray microcalorimeters to meet the needs of future instruments for x-ray astrophysics. The prototype focal plane for Lynx, a mission concept for an x-ray telescope, requires the flexibility to image large areas with moderate resolution across the 6 keV x-ray band while also imaging point sources with very high resolution for soft x-rays. ...
Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs) are used as the standard first-stage amplifier for the readout of cryogenic TES-based detector arrays, and multiplexing techniques are used to minimise the heat loads and complexity of TES readout systems. Frequency domain multiplexing is the baseline for the readout of an imaging array of TES-based microcalorimeters the X-IFU instrument...
In this contribution we present the Q&U Bolometric Interferometer for Cosmology (QUBIC) experiment. QUBIC is an experiment devoted to the observations of the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation with the goal to detect the signature of the Inflationary expansion of the Universe in its very early phase. QUBIC (an international collaboration between laboratories in France,...
Scintillating bolometers have traditionally employed phonon and photon readout to identify particle types from the ratio of the two signals. In addition, different phonon pulse shapes of electron and nuclear recoils have been observed, but improvements in particle discrimination have been focused on improved light collection or sensitivity. Here we show that observed pulse shape differences in...
AMoRE (Advanced Mo-based Rare process Experiment) is a large-scale low temperature detector to search for neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) of 100Mo. The project employs MMC readouts for simultaneous phonon-scintillation detection from scintillating crystals containing 100Mo elements. Because heat capacities of the detector components and MMC sensitivity vary with temperature, signal...
The low-mass frontier of Dark Matter, the measurement of the neutrino mass, the search for new light bosons in laboratory experiments, all require detectors sensitive to excitations of meV or smaller. Faint and rare signals, such as those produced by vacuum photoemission or by an Axion in a magnetic field, could be efficiently detected only by a new class of sensors.
The Italian Institute of...
SuperCDMS has been pursing R&D on a new style of detector (HVeV) that has already demonstrated single electron-hole pair discrimination. We have recently produced a second detector which has achieved 0.06 electron-hole pair resolution in Silicon, a record charge resolution for a gram-scale calorimeter. Using a contact-free biasing scheme, this detector has attained 3 eV phonon energy...
The SuperCDMS collaboration has been developing cryogenic silicon and germanium detectors optimized for phonon signals from dark matter-nucleus collisions. The detectors are sensitive to dark matter masses between about 1 and 10 GeV/c^2, which corresponds to sub-keV energy deposits from the nuclear recoil signal. The sensitivity of a SuperCDMS high voltage detector is achieved by applying a...
We have developed a new transition edge sensor (TES) material with transition temperature in the range 100-200mK. The new material is a solid solution of two superconducting components, MoxNb1-x, co-sputtered from two high-purity single-component targets (Mo and Nb) . The transition temperature, Tc, has a minimum (dTc/dx=0) at intermediate concentration of the components. We have optimized...
An experiment to search for neutrinoless double beta decay in $^{124}$Sn has been initiated in India [1]. It is envisaged to use a superconducting tin-based cryogenic bolometer (TIN.TIN) operating at $\sim$10 mK for this purpose. It is important to study various systematics related to the cryogenic bolometer with a relatively simpler and well-studied absorber material before making a...
Cryogenic sensor arrays for the next generation of scientific applications require more pixels and higher multiplexing factors. In recent years, microwave SQUID multiplexing ($\mu$mux) has emerged as a promising candidate for achieving large multiplexing factors with low readout noise penalty while reducing integration complexity and readout cost per sensor. In $\mu$mux, the current from each...
QUBIC is a ground based projet aiming to measure of the B-mode polarisation of the Cosmological Microwave Background. The instrument consists of a 300mK bolometric interferometer based on a 1000 pixel TES sensor technology. In this paper we describe in detail the fabrication process of the detector arrays and their integration into the QUBIC cryostat.
The Any Light Particle Search II (ALPS II) is an experiment at DESY, Hamburg that utilizes the concept of resonance enhancement to improve on the sensitivity of traditional light shining through a wall style experiments. Such experiments attempt to detect photons passing through an opaque, light-tight barrier by converting to relativistic, weakly interacting sub-eV particles and then...
The PTOLEMY project [1] is devoted to directly detect the Cosmic Neutrino Background (CNB). A key element of the project is the ability to detect few eV electrons with an energy resolution lower than 0.05 eV. Microcalorimeters based on transition-edge sensors (TES) are among the best candidates since they already reach 0.11 eV of energy resolution for telecomm photons [2]. To further increase...
The advanced Mo-based rare-process experiment (AMoRE) is an underground cryogenic particle detection experiment to search for neutrinoless double beta decay of 100Mo. The experiment uses scintillating crystals composed of enriched 100Mo isotopes as the target material for simultaneous detection of phonon and scintillation signals with MMC readouts at millikelvin temperatures. As a pilot stage...
The X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) is the X-ray microcalorimeter instrument on board the Advanced Telescope for High-ENergy Astrophysics (Athena). The X-IFU will provide spatially resolved high-resolution spectroscopy from 0.2 to 12 keV. The instrument has undergone successfully its Preliminary Requirement Review, demonstrating the feasibility of an instrument that will meet the scientific...
We report on a dichroic (150/220 GHz) detector array for the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS). The array is currently being deployed in a new CLASS telescope that will provide sensitivity to the polarized cosmic microwave background (CMB) and dust emission. In concert with existing 40 and 90 GHz telescopes, the 150/220 GHz observations over large angular scales with...
CMB-S4 is a next generation CMB experiment and is a major focus of the ground based CMB community. Three key science goals driving the technical requirements for CMB-S4 are: 1) searching for primordial gravitational waves resulting from an early period of accelerated expansion (inflation), 2) searching for new light relic particles in the early universe, and 3) providing a legacy survey of...
Neutrinoless double-beta decay is a hypothetical rare nuclear transition (T1/2>1026 yr) and its observation would imply lepton number violation and Majorana nature of neutrinos (ν ̅=ν), allowing to determine the absolute scale of the neutrino mass and to probe effects beyond the Standard Model. In this transition two neutrons decay simultaneously into two protons and two electrons. This decay...
There is compelling evidence for the existence of vast quantities of dark matter throughout the universe, however its identity remains a mystery. While weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) have been the focus of direct detection searches for several decades, there is growing interest in ultra-light, wave-like dark matter. The Dark Matter Radio (DM Radio) is a sensitive search for axion...
The Epoch of Reionization Spectrometer (EoR-Spec) is an instrument for the Prime-Cam receiver of the 6 m aperture CCAT-Prime Telescope at 5600 m in Chile. EoR-Spec will perform 158 um [CII] line intensity mapping of star-forming regions at redshifts between 3 and 8 (420 - 210 GHz), tracing the evolution of structure during early galaxy formation. At lower redshifts, EoR-Spec will observe...
The High Resolution Mid-Infrared Spectrometer (HIRMES) instrument will fly onboard the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) airborne Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) in 2021. It will provide astronomers with a unique observing window (25−122 μm) for exploring the evolution of protoplanetary disks into young solar systems. The instrument’s focal plane...
The Simons Observatory (SO) is a future cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment located on Cerro Toco, Chile that will map the microwave sky in temperature and polarization in six frequency bands spanning 27 to 280 GHz. SO will consist of one 6-meter Large Aperture Telescope (LAT) fielding approximately 30,000 detectors along with an array of three 0.5-meter Small Aperture Telescopes...
The X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) instrument on the Athena mission will be positioned at the Lagrangian point L1 or L2 and be subject to cosmic rays generated by astrophysics sources, primarily composed of protons. Previous simulations have shown that particles of energy higher than 30 GeV will make it through the outer layers of the satellite and will reach the focal plane and it's...
We present the design and implementation of a thermal model, developed in COMSOL, of the Athena X-IFU detector wafer, aiming to probe the wafer-scale thermal response arising from realistic impact rates and energies of cosmic rays at L2. The COMSOL simulation is a four-layer 2D model, where 2 layers represent the constituent materials (Si bulk and Si3N4 membrane), and 2 layers represent the Au...
Kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs) are an attractive sensor option for large-format arrays because they are highly multiplexable. Microstripline-coupled architectures are particularly attractive because they provide flexibility in optical coupling (phased-array antennas, lens-coupled antennas, and feedhorns) and permit integration of on-chip bandpass filters. However, there has not been...
Building upon the legacy of SuperSpec, an on-chip spectrometer operating at 1-mm that will begin observations in 2019, we are pursuing new technologies that will extend this technology to higher frequencies and higher resolving powers. This requires the use of new dielectrics, including both amorphous silicon and crystal silicon using a flipped SOI wafer process, new microstrip materials that...
Proximity effects in Transition Edge Sensors (TESs) do shape the
superconducting transition and are potentially responsible for
non-ideal behavior and undesired non-uniformity in multiplexed large
arrays of X-ray microcalorimeters for the XIFU instrument on board of
the future ESA space mission Athena.
In particular, nonlinear effects in the resistance and the reactance
are...
Metallic magnetic calorimeters (MMCs) are energy dispersive particle detectors that use a paramagnetic temperature sensor sitting in a weak magnetic field to convert the energy deposited into an absorber by an incident particle into a magnetic flux change within a superconducting pickup loop. The latter is connected to the input coil of a current-sensing SQUID to form a superconducting flux...
Photon-counting detectors are an enabling technology for future space-based far-infrared spectroscopic instruments such as those proposed as part of the Origins Space Telescope (OST) and would greatly increase the sensitivity and mapping speed of potential instruments. Microwave kinetic inductance detectors (KID) are a promising technology for these instruments, where large arrays of detectors...
We describe the development of a W-band Lumped-Element Kinetic Inductance Detector (LEKID) array for large ground-based telescopes like the Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT).
Starting from our previous experiences we decided to use a bi-layer (10 nm thick Ti $+$ 25 nm thick Al) able to cover frequencies greater than 65 GHz; and we decided to use a similar electrical architecture of the OLIMPO...
By lithographically structuring a thin film into arrays of low-loss micro-resonators, each with a unique resonant frequency in the GHz range, microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) are inherently suitable for frequency-division multiplexed readout. State-of-the-art MKID arrays for optical/near-infrared detection require frequency spacing of ~ 2 MHz, allowing around 500 pixels to be...
Frequency domain multiplexing (fMux) is an established technique for the readout of large arrays of transition edge sensor (TES) bolometers. Each TES in a multiplexing module has a unique AC voltage bias that is selected from a combined waveform by a resonant filter. This scheme enables the operation and readout of multiple bolometers on a single pair of wires, reducing thermal loading onto...
We present an on-sky demonstration of a microwave-multiplexing readout system in one of the receivers of the Keck Array, a polarimetry experiment observing the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at the South Pole. During the austral summer of 2018-2019, we replaced the time-domain multiplexing (TDM) system with microwave-multiplexing components including superconducting microwave resonators at...
Universal microwave multiplexing modules (UMMs) contain the 100 mK components of the Simons Observatory (SO) microwave multiplexing readout system. SO will map the cosmic microwave background in 6 frequency bands centered between 27 and 270 GHz with 60,000 transition edge sensor (TES) bolometers housed in 49 focal plane arrays called universal focal plane modules (UFMs). Enabling this high...
The next generation of cosmic microwave background (CMB) imagers are nearly upon us. Large millimeter wave cryogenic receivers under development for the Simons Observatory, ALI-CPT, CCAT-prime, and BICEP array will each couple tens of thousands of transition-edge sensors (TES) onto the sky. These large sensor counts will be achieved by tiling multiple 150mm-diameter multichroic detector arrays...
The high sensitivity requirements set by future Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) instruments are pushing the current technologies to produce highly performant focal plane arrays with thousands of detectors. The coupling of the detectors to the telescope optics is a challenging task. Current implemented solutions include phased-array antenna coupled detectors, platelet horn arrays and...
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a powerful tool for probing the earliest moments of the universe. However, millimeter-wave observations are complicated by the presence of astrophysical foregrounds, such as synchrotron emission and galactic dust, which also radiate at these wavelengths. By designing detectors with broad spectral coverage, these foregrounds can be separated from...
We report on the implementation of vacuum parallel-plate capacitor MKIDs for astronomical applications. MKIDs features an intrinsic excess noise probably due to the two-level systems (TLS) generated at metal/dielectric interface, particularly when dielectrics are amorphous, as well as in the bulk substrate. To attempt to reduce TLS, several groups are intensively investigating the use of...
Kinetic-inductance detectors have been developed rapidly thanks to their intrinsic frequency domain multiplexing property. However, the main limitation of the number of the usable detectors is found to be crosstalk in the frequency domain instead of fabrication yield. For example, the fraction of usable detectors of the NIKA2 instrument has been limited to 70~90% by the resonance overlapping...
An on-chip FTS consists of two waveguides coupled to long superconducting transmission lines (STLs) (∼ 520 mm) using two coupling probes. The signal propagating on one of the STLs is phase shifted with respect to the other line with a bias current that affects the nonlinear dependence of kinetic inductance, $\mathcal{L}_k(I)$ of the STL material. Here we describe measurements of a...
We describe the in$-$flight performance of the horn$-$coupled Lumped Element Kinetic Inductance Detector arrays of the OLIMPO balloon-borne experiments. These arrays have been designed to match the spectral bands of OLIMPO: 150, 250, 350, and 460 GHz. They have been operated at 0.3 K and at an altitude of 37.8 km during the July 2018 stratospheric flight of the OLIMPO payload.
During the first...
Future mm-wave and sub-mm space missions (e.g., PICO, LiteBIRD, SPICA, OST) will employ large arrays of multiplexed Transition Edge Sensor (TES) bolometers that may be vulnerable to frequent 'glitches' caused by cosmic ray (CR) interactions. Such glitches posed a challenge to data analysis from the Planck bolometers, due to the high rate and long duration of glitches from interactions in the...
Recent developments of transition-edge sensors (TESes), based on extensive experience in ground-based experiments, have been making the sensor techniques matured enough for their application possibilities on future satellite CMB polarization experiments. LiteBIRD (Lite (Light) satellite for the studies of B-mode polarization and Inflation from cosmic background Radiation Detection) is in the...
QUBIC (Q & U Bolometric Interferometer for Cosmology) is an international ground-based experiment dedicated in the measurement of the polarized fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). It is based on bolometric interferometry, an original detection technique which combine the immunity to systematic effects of an interferometer with the sensitivity of low temperature incoherent...
The high dynamic range as well as the very good linearity in combination with an excellent energy resolution make metallic magnetic calorimeters (MMCs) ideal detectors for different applications in high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy. The maXs detector family consists of several 1- and 2-dimensional MMC arrays based on paramagnetic temperature sensors made of Ag:Er or Au:Er that are optimized...
Metallic magnetic calorimeters (MMCs) combine the very high energy resolution characteristic of cryogenic gamma detectors with a very small nonlinearity and a reproducible response function due to their all-metallic design and their thermodynamic equilibrium sensor. These attributes make MMCs well-suited for photon and particle spectroscopy applications requiring the highest accuracy. We are...
Low-temperature microcalorimeters for x rays and gamma rays can have energy resolving powers in excess of one thousand and can cover a very broad energy range. They will achieve their ultimate potential, however, only if we take great care in the analysis of their data. To estimate pulse sizes, we must use statistically optimal weighting of the data in the presence of non-white—and possibly...
In 2018, we commissioned a gamma-ray spectrometer at Los Alamos National Laboratory consisting of 256 Transition-Edge Sensors (TESs) for high-resolution measurements of photon energies up to and beyond 200 keV. This instrument, called SLEDGEHAMMER, is the first fielded microcalorimeter instrument to be read out using microwave SQUID multiplexing. In this presentation, we discuss the...
Precise quantification of radionuclides in a radioactive sample by photon spectrometry requires a good knowledge of the photon emission intensities. However, they are hardly better known than to within 1%. In the case of actinide L X-rays, although their emission intensities are large, they are not detailed in the databases; sometimes there exist no measurements, therefore the intensities are...
Researches that use bolometric, scintillating or semiconductor high impedance detectors, such as those experiments devoted to the study of dark matter and the neutrino mass, as well as astrophysics, demand ultra-low noise amplifiers. The signal to noise ratio increases by minimizing both the heat injection and the input stray capacitance, which leads to locate the front-end electronics at...
We developed a neutron transmission imager based on a superconducting current-biased kinetic inductance detector (CB-KID). The CB-KID comprises X and Y meanderlines and a 10B conversion layer for neutrons. A 4He or 7Li ion from the 10B(n, α)7Li reaction creates two hot spots in both the X and Y meanders. A pair of electromagnetic-wave pulses of opposite polarities propagate toward the ends of...
Detection of single photon or small number of photons is a key technology to bring about a breakthrough to optical probes for delicate biological samples, in the bio-research and the bio-industry alike. Optical transition edge sensor (optical TES) is one of the most promising single photon detectors for such applications, with its array of features including; broadband sensitivity which ranges...
This presentation shows applications of superconducting tunnel junctions (STJ) cryodetection in heavy ion mass spectrometry (HIMS). STJs have 100% detection efficiency at all m/z’s including those with MegaDalton molecular weights (MW) as the signal output is independent of ion velocity. STJs also allow the determination of ion energy deposited into the detector which can be used for charge...
Micro-X sounding rocket X-ray space telescope was launched for the first time on the night of the 22nd July 2018 from the White Sand Missile Range (New Mexico, USA). It successfully pioneered the first flight of a Transition-Edge Sensor (TES) array and its time multiplexing read-out system in space. This launch was dedicated to the observation of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. However, a...
We report on the development of large format arrays using multiabsorber transition edge sensors (TESs), commonly referred to as ‘hydras’. A hydra consists of multiple x-ray absorbers each with a different thermal conductance to a TES. Position information is encoded in the pulse shape. With some trade-off in performance, hydras enable the development of very large format arrays without the...
We describe performance of large-scale arrays of metallic magnetic calorimeters (MMCs) we are developing to meet requirements of the Lynx X-ray Microcalorimeter (LXM) instrument in the astrophysics mission concept Lynx. We have fabricated prototypes with 55,800 x-ray pixels thermally connected to 5,688 MMC sensors. Subarrays demonstrate three types of pixels, which have different energy and...
It is widely accepted that we are in the midst of a second quantum revolution. The first quantum revolution explained the nature of physical reality, and provided much of the technology that makes the modern world possible. The second quantum revolution is deploying modern tools to manipulate and control coherent quantum systems for computation, simulation, communication, and sensing /...
Photodetection plays a key role in basic science and technology, with exquisite performance having been achieved down to the single photon level. Further improvements in photodetectors would open new possibilities across a broad range of scientific disciplines, and enable new types of applications. However, it is still unclear what is possible in terms of ultimate performance, and what...
Artificial atoms based on superconducting qubits can be used to perform quantum non-demolition measurements of signal photons in microwave cavity detectors of low mass dark matter waves. By measuring only the photon wave's amplitude while remaining insensitive to the conjugate phase observable, these sensors evade the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and exhibit noise levels far below those...
The direct detection of WIMP dark matter has so far eluded detection efforts. Like WIMPs, the QCD axion is a natural dark-matter candidate, but large parts of its parameter space, including some of the most well-motivated models, remain unexplored. We describe the Dark Matter Radio (DM Radio), a low-temperature search for axions and hidden-photons over the peV$-$$\mu$eV mass range. Axion and...
Over the last few years, the Transition-Edge-Sensor spectrometer (TES) has been rapidly matured. This review presents the latest examples of the application of TES to the fundamental sciences; e.g., the beam-line environments for X-ray, the laboratory experiment for the neutral atom spectroscopy, and the space application. The application for the fundamental science is extraordinarily...
The X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) is an imaging spectrometer of 3,168 X-ray transition-edge sensors (TESs) under development for ESA’s Athena satellite mission. Our time-division SQUID multiplexing (TDM) architecture is a backup readout option for X-IFU. In TDM, each dc-biased TES is coupled to its own first-stage SQUID (SQ1). The SQ1s are turned on and off sequentially such that one...
Releasing TES islands from a silicon substrate is the most challenging step of TES fabrication process and it limits the yield of wafers. The etching rate and surface shape of wet etching method is difficult to control, and the stop layer of silicon dioxide for deep reactive-ion etching (DRIE) is difficult to clear after releasing process. We present a combined method of DRIE and wet etching...
The application of LTD suffers from the complexity and the lack of reliability of low temperature cryogenic solutions. While dilution cryostats offer a versatile solution for development purposes, they have several drabacks to build a user-friendly systems that requires a high reliability. We discuss the design of a solution based on a continuous ADR cryostat for LTD application in the range...
We present a novel technique for characterization of devices in which energy deposited by a particle interaction is measured by sensing athermal phonon creation in an array of kinetic inductance sensors (KIDs) on the substrate’s surface (Moore+ 2012; Aralis+ this conference). We combine a standard KID array readout frequency comb with a strong, monochromatic RF pulse, whose frequency is chosen...
The discovery of the Trappist-1 system, which consists of an ultra cool M-dwarf star orbited by 7 planets, 3 of which are located in the habitable zone, has demonstrated that these types of planetary systems are very common. The search for bio-signatures in the atmosphere of such planets will be a high-priority science goal of future space missions. The mid-IR band between 3 and 15 um is...
The recently released Xilinx ZCU111 Radio Frequency System-on-Chip (RFSoC) Evaluation Kit is a very promising option for a Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector (MKID) readout system. It provides FPGA resources of 930,000 system logic cells and 4,272 DSP slices, as well as eight on-chip 14-bit digital-to-analogue converters (DACs) with 6.5 giga-samples per second (GSPS) and eight 12-bit...
The HOLMES experiment is a large-scale experiment for the electron neutrino mass determination. It will perform a calorimetric measurement of the energy released in the electron capture decay of 163Ho. In its final stage, HOLMES will employ 1000 microcalorimeters with Transition Edge Sensors (TES). These detectors are being used more and more frequently in physics and astronomy experiments,...
We have developed Antenna-coupled transition-edge sensor (TES) arrays for high-sensitivity cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations over a wide range of millimeter-wave bands. BICEP Array is the latest instrument in the BICEP/Keck experiment series, which is designed to search for inflationary B-Modes as low as the tensor-to-scalar ratio r=0.01 in the presence of galactic foregrounds. We...
The Simons Observatory (SO) will measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization using a suite of new telescopes in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The SO will use multichroic transition edge sensor (TES) bolometer arrays spanning six frequency bands from 27GHz to 280GHz.
The SO will pioneer use of a densely-packed multiplexing architecture based on the microwave SQUID...
Large arrays of microcalorimeters with hundreds of pixels are needed for detection efficiency, but present challenges for data processing. In typical applications of microcalorimeter x-ray and gamma-ray spectroscopy, the desired output is a single energy-calibrated spectrum made by combining data from the individual pixels. This data processing often requires significant input from an expert...
BASKET (Bolometers At Sub-KeV Energy Thresholds) is an R&D program aiming at the development of innovative detectors to search for neutrinoless double beta decay and for the coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering (CNNS) at reactors. In this poster, we will focus on the latter search. We propose the development of Li2WO4 crystals as a new absorber material for the CNNS coupled to new thermal...
Initially looking for a simple method to precisely characterise long thermal time constants (tails) in bolometric chain time responses, we developed a model and an experiment on a simple NTD Germanium sub-millimetric detector. We since realised that Joule ramping, adding a generated triangle wave through a small capacitor to temporarily create a small step in the constant bias current, gives...
BULLKID is an R&D project on a new cryogenic particle detector to search for rare low energy processes such as low-mass dark matter and neutrino coherent scattering off nuclei. The detector unit we are designing consists in an array of around 100 silicon absorbers sensed by phonon-mediated, microwave-multiplexed Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KIDs), with energy threshold below 100 eVnr and...
The Simons Array (SA) is a Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization experiment comprised of three identical telescopes located in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. SA was designed to measure mid- to large-scale CMB anisotropies in order to constrain the tensor-to-scalar ratio ($\sigma(r=0.1)=6\times10^{-3}$) and the sum of the neutrino masses ($\sigma(\sum m_\nu) = 40$ meV). Each SA...
We aim to realize a single-photon detector which greatly improves its sensitivity and response speed by minimizing of the thermometer volume using a single superconducting iridium thin film and electrical circuit. Iridium has a sharp superconducting transition at 112 mK in bulk, therefore, even if it is used as a single superconducting thin film for the thermometer of TES, excellent energy...
COSINUS (Cryogenic Observatory for SIgnatures seen in Next-generation Underground Searches) is a cryogenic calorimeter operated at mK temperature, dedicated to the direct dark matter search in underground laboratories. Its main goal is to cross-check the annual modulation signal the DAMA collaboration has been detecting since many years and which has been ruled out by other experiments in some...
Metallic Magnetic Calorimeters (MMCs) are energy-dispersive low-temperature detectors that are particularly suitable for radionuclide spectrometry over wide energy ranges and with high energy resolution. Within the European Metrology Research Project MetroBeta, MMCs are utilized for beta spectrometry. To obtain a high-resolution beta spectrum with enough statistics to allow a shape analysis, a...
We are developing arrays of fine-pitch X-ray transition-edge sensor (TES)
microcalorimeters for use in future space-based X-ray astrophysics missions
such as the proposed Lynx X-ray Microcalorimeter. In this contribution we
discuss arrays optimized to have the best possible energy resolution for a
limited energy range for the incoming X-rays, such as up to ~0.8 keV for the
Lynx Ultra-Hi-Res...
POLARBEAR-2A (PB-2A) is a project to observe polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that deployed to the Atacama Desert in Chile (altitude 5200 m), and is a successor of POLARBEAR (PB) experiment. PB-2A is focusing on observation of polarization in CMB, especially polarization pattern called B-mode as it can constrain fascinating physics such as primordial cosmic inflation and...
We are developing an ultra-wideband spectroscopic instrument, DESHIMA (Deep Spectroscopic HIgh-redshift Mapper), based on the technologies of an on-chip filterbank and Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector (MKID) in order to investigate dusty starburst galaxies in the distant universe at millimeter and submillimeter wavelength. On-site experiment of prototype DESHIMA was performed using the...
We are developing an ultra-wideband spectroscopic instrument, DESHIMA, a spectrometer integrated on-chip filterbank and microwave kinetic inductance detector (MKID) technologies to investigate dusty starburst galaxies in the distant universe at millimeter and submillimeter wavelength. On-site experiment of prototype DESHIMA was promoted using the ASTE 10-m telescope in Oct. and Nov. 2017. In...
In order to make improved spectral imaging measurements in the ultraviolet, visible and near infrared bands, we investigated the design of a 10 kilopixel Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector (MKID) sensitive in these bands. We evaluate design parameters and different geometries for MKIDs arrays with equally spaced resonant frequencies and high intrinsic and coupling quality factors. Resonance...
Advanced Mo-based Rare process Experiment (AMoRE) is an international collaboration project to search for neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) of 100Mo using Molybdenum-based crystals. To increase the detection sensitivity for this extremely rare event, AMoRE aims at operating the detector in zero-background condition. A commissioning phase of the project, AMoRE-Pilot were carried out during...
The reference design for the next-generation cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment, CMB-S4, relies on large arrays of transition edge sensor (TES) bolometers coupled to Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID)-based readout systems. Mapping the CMB to near cosmic variance limits will enable the search for signatures of inflation and constrain dark energy and neutrino physics....
The design and experimental demonstration of a 16-channel frequency-domain multiplexing (FDM) readout for transition-edge sensor (TES) bolometers is presented. This MUX electronics is intended to readout the 326 spiderweb bolometers of the LSPE/SWIPE balloon-borne experiment, which aims at the detection of the B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at large angular...
Very low threshold massive bolometers are key devices for light dark matter search and coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering physics. In this paper we describe recent development on Germanium bolometers equipped with NbSi transition edge sensors. These sensors exhibit a transient out-of-equilibrium phonon signal that improves detector sensitivity. Optimization of the bolometer design to...
We will report Kinetic Inductance Detectors(KIDs) fabricated on a 6in and an 8in process in an external foundry. These processes allow us to fabricate large arrays of KIDs.
Increasing the number of superconducting detectors strongly supported a wide variety of astronomical observation and particle physics experiment. Actually, the sensitivity of the CMB measurements is exponentially improved...
DIAS is working on the further development of Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) for astronomical instrumentation in the visible and near-IR. In collaboration with Trinity College Dublin we design, fabricate and analyse our detector prototypes and we intend to build and deploy an astronomical camera towards the project’s end. We plan to use sub-stoichiometric TiNx multi-layered...
Recent millimeter-wavelength telescopes require cryogenically cooled optics to achieve a high-sensitivity observation. A broadband anti-reflection (AR) technology that works at cryogenic temperature has been desired. Silicon is one of the suitable materials for millimeter-wave optics in cryogenic use. This is because it shows low-loss at a cryogenic temperature in the millimeter wavelength.
...
The Simons Observatory (SO) is a next generation Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiment in the Atacama Desert of Chile that will measure both temperature and polarization at frequencies ranging from 27 - 270 GHz. SO will deploy 60,000 transition edge sensor bolometers across 49 multi-chroic detector arrays. Housed in both large-aperture (6 m) and small-aperture (0.5 m) telescopes, these...
The purpose of COBAND (COsmic BAckground Neutrino Decay) experiment is to determine neutrino mass by measuring neutrino decay photon. Expected neutrino decay photon energy is too small (25 meV) to detect using a semiconductor detector,so we adopted the STJ (Superconducting tunnel Junction) detector using superconductor which has much smaller energy gap than a semiconductor. Our Nb/Al-STJ...
Axion is a hypothetical elementary particle proposed to solve the strong CP problem in QCD and is one of dark-matter candidates. The sun is considered to emit axions of a continuum spectrum similar to that of blackbody emission with kT~1.3 keV by the Primakoff effect. In addition, line emission is expected through M1 transitions of nuclei; an example is 14.4 keV from $^{57}$Fe (Moriyama...
SuperSpec is a new technology for millimeter and submillimeter spectroscopy. It is an on-chip spectrometer being developed for multi-object, moderate resolution, large bandwidth survey spectroscopy of high-redshift galaxies for the 1 mm atmospheric window. SuperSpec targets the CO ladder in the redshift range of z = 0 to 4, the [CII] 158 um line from z = 5 to 9, and the [NII] 205 um line from...
SPICA is a spatial infrared observatory project proposed by the Japanese spatial agency (JAXA) and selected in May 2018, with two other projects, as M5 medium mission candidate of the ESA Cosmic Vision Program. B-BOP is one the three instruments of this project: a three-band polarimetric imager made of five 16 x 16 pixels matrices and one 8 x 8 pixels matrix.
The B-BOP detector has the...
Film stress has been long known to affect the properties and performances of thin superconductors. In the quantum computing field, a slightly compressive film (~ -100 MPa) has been shown to be ideal for making superconducting-insulating-superconducting (SIS) junctions, no analogous study has been done for superconducting resonators. Anecdotal evidence suggests compressive films show lower loss...
For integrated FET based circuitry in close proximity to the front-end detectors or semiconductor or superconducting qubit generating hardware held at cryogenic temperatures, any transfer of heat produced in the FET circuitry alters the performance conditions of the system and results in noise and spurious signals. Therefore, it is of great interest to analyze and experimentally characterize...
The energy range of transition-edge-sensor (TES) X-ray microcalorimeters with a multiplexed read-out depends upon the width and shape of the TES superconducting transition, and also on the dynamic range of the read-out. In many detector systems, the multiplexed read-out slew rate capability will be the limiting factor for the energy range. In these cases, if we are willing to accept some...
Future cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments, including the large scale ground based Stage Four CMB Experiment (CMB-S4), satellites, and balloons, aim to map the CMB to an unprecedented precision in order to answer several key questions in cosmology. However, to reach the target noise sensitivity, more than 100,000 detectors will be needed. Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors...
Kinetic inductance detectors (KID) have received increased interest due to their low noise, and scalability to large format arrays required by next generation of astronomical telescopes. The development of KIDs has progressed rapidly, with very low noise equivalent power demonstrated by several groups and KIDs arrays implemented in several ground-based and air-borne instruments. In this...
SAFARI is the prime focal-plane instrument on board the space observatory, SPICA, a candidate for ESA’s fifth medium class mission in its Cosmic Vision science programme, with a planned launch date in 2032. Combining a large, cold mirror with ultra-sensitive detectors (dark NEP $\leq2\times10^{-19}\rm\ W/\sqrt{Hz}$), SPICA/SAFARI will probe the chemistry of the cold, dusty Universe with...
A large cylindrical cadmium molybdate crystal with natural isotopic abundance has been successfully used to fabricate a cryogenic microcalorimeter. The measurement was performed above ground at milli-Kelvin temperature, allowing simultaneous readout of the heat and the scintillation light using NTD-Ge sensors. We present its powerful discrimination capability of $\alpha$ versus $\gamma/\beta$...
Kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs) are being implemented in more telescopes due chiefly to their excellent sensitivity and natural multiplexability. We have integrated a superconducting nanowire into the resonant circuits, increasing the frequency response, which in turn, increases the sensitivity for single photon detection. Analyzing the frequency response as a function of optical power, we...
We present simulation software utilizing graphical processing units (GPUs) for the physics of detectors based on arrays of transition-edge sensors (TES).
With the support of GPUs it is possible to perform simulations of large pixel arrays, making the software a powerful tool in detector development.
Comparisons with TES small-signal and noise theory confirm the representativity of the...
The GroundBIRD is a telescope aiming a precise observation of the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at the Teide observatory in Spain. The E-mode polarization of CMB has been observed by various experiments and provided useful information of the early universe. On the other hand, the B-mode of CMB polarization, which is known to be generated by the primordial gravitational...
The SuperCMDS collaboration uses advanced high voltage Neganov-Luke phonon-assisted detectors for low mass dark matter detection. The leakage current associated with high voltages limits the ultimate sensitivity reach for this large mass detector technology. Although the current leakage performance of the detectors is sufficient for SuperCDMS SNOLAB requirements, improvements are needed to...
B-BOP is one of the three scientific instruments of SPICA which aims, among other scientific goals, to map the galactic filamentary structures and their associated magnetic fields.
Each pixel of B-BOP consists of two orthogonal arrays of dipole antennas supported by four suspended interlaced spirals based on Si :P, B. In order to have a deep understanding of the influence of the doping...
We are developing a chemical imaging capability (“Hyperspectral X-ray Imaging”) for microscopic samples based on ultra-high-resolution x-ray emission spectroscopy with large transition-edge sensor microcalorimeter arrays in the scanning electron microscope. By combining microcalorimeter arrays with hundreds of pixels, high-bandwidth microwave frequency-division multiplexing, and fast digital...
The existence of Dark Matter (DM) is supported by astronomical data and observations; however, to date there is no confirmed direct detection of DM. The SuperCDMS collaboration has expanded its capabilities with the development of the prototype HVeV detector. The HVeV detector uses a high voltage applied across the Si (or Ge) crystal to accelerate charges, which scatter off the crystal lattice...
Energy-dispersive low-temperature detectors (LTDs) enable radionuclide spectrometry with energy resolutions exceeding by far those of conventional detectors such as Si(Li) detectors. Also, the energy threshold of radionuclide spectra can be much lower than with conventional techniques. Within the European Metrology Research Project “MetroBeta”, beta spectrometry based on metallic magnetic...
Superconducting transition edge sensors (TESs) have demonstrated high detection efficiency and photon-number resolving capability, making TESs attractive in quantum information. The detection efficiency is determined by several factors: fiber-to-detector coupling, absorption of photons in superconducting films, and internal quantum efficiency. The optical absorption of titanium film at the...
Refrigerators based on normal metal-insulator-superconductor (NIS) junctions are an attractive solution for cooling superconducting detectors, particularly in balloon- and space-based experiments. The addition of NIS devices to a cryogenic system can enable payload temperatures near 100 mK from launch temperatures near 300 mK. Used in conjunction with a 3He sorption fridge, NIS devices can...
A superconducting transition edge sensor (TES) is used as an ultrasensitive thermometer to measure temperature changes in the range of μK. In the framework of the CRESST experiment (Cryogenic Rare Events Search with Superconducting Thermometers); which is a direct dark matter detection experiment, tungsten TESs are used as the sensing element. Detectors in CRESST are constituted, in brief, of...
We target to realise a future satellite mission, LiteBIRD, which will observe full sky at the second Sun-Earth Lagrangian point (L2) and measure the polarisation of the Cosmic Microwave Backgrounds (CMB).
We plan to use Transition Edge Sensor (TES) bolometers to measure the polarisation signal.Measurements of past satellite missions at L2 were disturbed by galactic cosmic rays.Therefore, we...
Bringing the operating frequency of available single photon detectors down to the microwave regime is an important capability for microwave quantum optics and superconducting quantum information processing. However, this task remains challenging due to the small energy of photons at this frequency compared to room temperature noise. Our circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) based detector [1]...
KIDSPec, the Kinetic Inductance Detector Spectrograph, is a novel concept for a highly sensitive, medium spectral resolution optical through near-IR spectrograph. It uses the intrinsic energy resolving capability of an array of optical/IR-sensitive MKIDs to distinguish multiple orders from a low-resolution grating. By acting as an ‘order resolver’, the MKID array replaces the cross-disperser...
CaF2 is a novel target for neutrino-less double-beta decay and spin-dependent dark matter studies, since 48Ca is one of the double-beta decay nuclei and 19F is sensitive to spin-dependent elastic scattering with dark matter.
We implement kinetic inductance detectors(KIDs) on CaF2 crystal which is used as substrate. KIDs on CaF2 is cooled to low temperature with a dilution fridge. The resonance...
We have been developing a microwave superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) multiplexing (MW-Mux) for the future X-ray astronomical observatory with large field of view and high-resolution imaging spectrometer such as super DIOS (T. Ohashi et al., 2018). MW-Mux consists of a number of superconducting resonators coupled to each dissipationless radio-frequency (RF) SQUID detecting...
We present the progress on the MMC development to be used in the AMoRE project. AMoRE used MMCs as the main readout technology for heat and light detection. The MMCs sensors was first developed based on a gold alloy with 1000 ppm Er. The size of the AuEr sensor material was determined to optimize signal size in the heat channel having a large crystal absorber of about 100 cm^3. Since the...
Using microcalorimeters, a high statistics, high resolution calorimetric spectrum of electron capture in ${}^{163}$Ho can be used to determine the neutrino mass. The spectral shape can be calculated from first principles with various assumptions and approximations. To determine the validity of these choices, the theoretical calculations must be compared to data from multiple isotopes. New...
Kinetic inductance bolometer represents a sensor technology that can be scaled into large 2D detector arrays. Such detector arrays are attractive for passive sub-millimeter and terahertz imaging systems, providing mechanical simplicity and good-enough imaging capability for terrestrial imaging. We have previously reported on the successful implementation of an imaging system containing a focal...
Cadmium-116 is one of the most favourable candidates for neutrinoless double-beta decay (0vBB) searches for two main reasons: first, the energy of the decay (Q = 2813.49 keV) is higher than the end point of the natural gamma radioactivity (2615 keV); then, it can be embedded in CdWO4 crystals, which are efficient scintillators. It was used by the AURORA experiment, which improved the half-life...
We present a noise model of the cryogenic High Electron Mobility Transistor developed at C2N laboratory. The model is based on dedicated measurement of voltage and current noises at temperature in the 1K-10K range. The model shows that 10 eV rms and 20 eVee rms could be obtained on the heat channel and ionization channel of massive semiconductor detector operated at low temperature.
Such...
Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector (MKID) is one of cutting edge superconducting detectors. Its principle is based on a superconducting resonator circuit. A signal transferred to the MKID breaks Cooper pairs in the superconducting resonator. As a result, we detect an intensity of the signal as a variation of the resonant condition. It is important to calibrate the variation of the resonant...
We report on the observation of frequency up-conversion gain in superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) tunnel junctions at millimeter wavelengths. So far, SIS tunnel junctions have been used as frequency down-converters with the ultra-low noise performance approaching the quantum limit and have exhibited positive gain in the down-conversion process. In principle, it is also possible to...
Sub-mm wave on-chip filter-bank spectrometers disperse THz radiation by means of shunted band-pass filters whose ideal frequency response is a matched-filter to the Lorentzian-shaped spectrum of broadened extra-galactic emission lines, resulting in a resolution requirement of $R=f/\delta{f}\sim{}500$. Furthermore, the instantaneous bandwidth of operation should be as wide as possible to allow...
SPT-3G is a third-generation camera for the South Pole Telescope that uses a trichroic pixel architecture and ~16,000 transition-edge sensor (TES) bolometers to map the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). After successfully observing since January 2017 using TiAu TES bolometers, in December 2018, we replaced one of the ten 150mm detector wafers that comprise the focal plane...
We present an investigation of frequency up- and down-conversion processes in a superconductor–insulator–superconductor (SIS) tunnel junction. A quasiparticle SIS tunnel junction potentially allows positive conversion gain in the down-conversion process from a millimeter wave to a microwave. Recently, we experimentally found that the tunnel junction can also up-convert a microwave signal to a...
On-chip spectrometers, such as DESHIMA and SuperSpec, require transmission lines with $Q_i>10^4$ to achieve sufficient system efficiency. Transmission lines with lower $Q_i$ would introduce too much losses in the line from antenna to filter and in the filters themselves. Data regarding the losses of transmission lines at THz frequencies and sub-K temperatures is severely lacking. An on-chip...
Low-temperature Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) samples offer long-lived quantum states that are extremely sensitive to small perturbations from new physics, including interactions with axion dark matter. The sensitivity of NMR axion detectors is sometimes limited by the precision with which the magnetization of the spin state can be read out, especially when large geometric pickup coil...
Total decay energy spectrometry (Q spectrometry) with cryogenic detectors is a promising technique for analysis α-emitting actinides. The radioactive sample is embedded in a 4 pi absorber, and the total decay energy (Q value) for each disintegration is measured. The energy spectrum is therefore simple: there is one peak per radionuclide corresponding to the Q value. The high energy resolution...
Frequency-Division Multiplexing (FDM) is the baseline readout system for the large array of superconducting Transition-Edge Sensors (TES's) under development for the ESA X-IFU instrument on the future Athena X-ray telescope.
Excellent single pixel performance has been demonstrated already with MHz biased MoAu NASA-Goddard TESs and energy resolution below 2eV @ 6keV is routinely observed, in...
High-resolution X-ray microcalorimeters are challenging to characterize and calibrate at low energies because of the difficulty of obtaining narrow calibration lines approaching the detector resolution. Short pulses of optical light, e.g. generated by a 405 nm laser diode, can be used to provide combs of very narrow calibration lines for TES detectors as long as the detector can resolve the...
SuperSpec is an ultra-sensitive on-chip spectrometer for mm and sub-mm wave observations of high-redshift dusty galaxies. The device employs a filterbank architecture in which kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs) are coupled to mm-wave resonant filters along a single microwave feedline. We present the progress on several advances to the SuperSpec filter bank technology that will be crucial for...
Metallic magnetic calorimeter (MMC) technology is a leading contender for detectors for the Lynx X-ray Microcalorimeter, which is an imaging spectrometer consisting of an array of greater than 100,000 pixels. The fabrication of such large arrays presents a challenge when attempting to route the superconducting wiring from the pixels to the multiplexed readout. If the wiring is designed to be...
The X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) will operate an array of more than 3000 Transition-Edge Sensor pixels at 90 mK with an unprecedented energy resolution of 2.5 eV at 7 keV. In space, primary cosmic rays and secondary particles produced in the instrument structure will continuously deposit energy in the detector wafer and induce fluctuations of the pixels' thermal bath. In this...
We are developing high resolution transition edge sensor (TES) microcalorimeters for the Athena X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) instrument. The x-ray absorbers of the TES pixels must provide high quantum efficiency (QE) for the incident x-rays and high reflectivity to longer wavelength radiation. Our pixel designs use ~ 5 micron thick electroplated Au-Bi absorbers. The thickness of the Au...
Cryogenic lumped-element resonators are near-optimal detectors of the electromagnetic interactions of ultralight (sub-μeV), wavelike dark matter candidates, including axions and hidden photons. Operated as classical detectors, they have sensitivity to well motivated regions of dark matter parameter space, including the QCD axion band at masses from 10neV to 1 μeV. Quantum coherent measurement...
Discovery of neutrino oscillations revealed that neutrinos have mass, but the absolute mass of the neutrinos still remains unknown. Since neutrinos are a massive particle, a heavier neutrino may decay into a lighter one with a photon emission. The photon energy is expected to be around 25 meV at maximum. The COsmic BAckground Neutrino Decay (COBAND) experiment aims at detecting the photons as...
We explore the use of cryogenic detectors as the energy resolving component of a laboratory transmission EXAFS instrument. EXAFS (Extended X-ray Absorption Fine Structure) is a powerful X-ray technique that gives element specific information about the structure of molecules. It has the enormous advantage that it does not need a specialized sample form, such as a crystal, and so it can be...
We are developing a detector array for astronomical observation in
100-GHz band using Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector (MKID)
and a readout system for the array with frequency sweeping scheme,
which uses a frequency sweeping probe signal instead of a
fixed-frequency probe signal. This scheme enables us to obtain
resonance spectra of MKIDs in an array simultaneously and to derive
the...
The application of transition edge sensors (TESs) to exotic atom X-ray
spectroscopy requires challenging techniques of measurement and
analysis. We have developed them through the pionic and kaonic atom
X-ray measurements with a 240-pixel TES array at hadron beamlines.
One of the important analyses is to investigate the charged particle
impacts on the TES array. The energy deposits of charged...
MUSCAT (the Mexico UK Submillimetre Camera for AsTronomy) is a 1.1-mm receiver currently in the final stages of development and scheduled for deployment on the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) on Volcán Sierra Negra in Mexico during the third quarter of 2019. In its first generation, MUSCAT will use 1,500 LEKID detectors to carry out follow-up observations of Herschel-ATLAS fields. However,...
Superconducting sensors for millimeter and submillimeter astronomy require thin dielectric films. The dielectrics SiO2 and SiNx are currently used for these applications for fabrication convenience reasons. However, they have a loss tangent (tan δ) close to 1e-3. The loss tangent is a critical parameter for these applications because it determines the microstripline's attenuation and the...
The Simons Observatory (SO) will place new limits on cosmological parameters by measuring fluctuations in the temperature and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Achieving these high precision measurements will require state-of-the-art instrumentation with extraordinary sensitivity and carefully-tuned parameters. To assist with instrument development, SO uses BoloCalc, a...
Modern Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) detectors are planar superconducting devices that employ striplines for the millimeter radiation transfer from a coupling antenna to a power readout Transition Edge Sensor (TES), as well as in-line filters to define the bandpass. Quality of dielectric materials separating signal lines and ground plane are crucial to determine yield of the fabrication...
The Simons Observatory (SO) is a polarized CMB experiment on the Cerro Toco Plateau with large overlap with other optical and infrared surveys (DESI, LSST, HSC). Polarized measurements of the CMB provide a wealth of cosmological and astrophysical information. SO aims to improve existing CMB polarization measurements at a large range of angular scales by building 3 small aperture telescopes...
D. McCammon, F. T. Jaeckel, K. Nelms, C.V. Ambarish, A. Roy
Physics Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, 53706 USA
Superconducting/normal metal layer bilayers with tunable TC are widely used as transition edge sensors in high-resolution microcalorimeters. When these layers are patterned, channels with enhanced TC (compared to the bilayer) form along the edges of the device...
Stripline and Microstrip with the characteristics of low-cost, high reliability and easy installing are more suitable for the cryogenic applications compared with semi-rigid coaxial cables. The stripline and microstrip were designed and fabricated in our laboratory through researching into thermal conductivity of the internal and external conductors and the technology of microwave and...
Superconducting transition-edge sensors (TESs) are highly sensitive detectors. Based on the outstanding performance on spectral resolution, the X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) instrument on-board Athena will be equipped with a large array of TES based microcalorimeters. SRON is developing a Frequency Domain Multiplexing (FDM) readout scheme for the X-IFU instrument. SRON will also develop...
Superconducting parametric amplifiers based on nonlinear kinetic inductance are well suited for use as readout amplifiers for low temperature detector technologies involving frequency domain multiplexing at GHz frequencies. These paramps can have very wide instantaneous bandwidth and large enough dynamic range to handle thousands of signals at typical levels for superconducting detectors. ...
Based on the giant thermoelectric effect of a superconductor/ferromagnet tunnel junction [1], a novel ultrasensitive radiation detector (SFTED) has been proposed both as bolometer [2] and calorimeter [3]. This type of detector can be operated without the need of additional circuit lines for the sensing bias, and at the same time providing a noise equivalent power (NEP) below...
Ag and Er in a carbon crucible with 2” inner diameter was melt by induction heating. The chamber of the heating furnace was pumped into vacuum and maintained at Ar gas atmospheric pressure to suppress Ag evaporation. The internal temperature of the carbon crucible was raised to 1700 oC even higher than Er melting point(1529 oC) to form a convention flow in melt metals. Convection of the metal...
We have investigated dilute alloys of small amounts of holmium in gold and silver in order to determine the impact of their heat capacity contribution on the performance of the microcalorimeters in the neutrino mass experiment ECHo. In particular, we focus on alloys with atomic concentrations of $x_\textrm{Ho}=0.01\,\mathrm{\%} \text{ -} \,3\,\%$ at temperatures between $10\,\textrm{mK}$ and...
Shanghai is constructing a soft X-ray and Hard X-ray Coherent Light Facility near to ShanghaiTech, to do Light-element X-ray fluorescence analysis and dilute or radiation sensitive sample measurement, we need develop TES X-ray spectrometer for them. To reach high energy resolution and keep a high flux ability, we prefer a small size TES. However, small size TES may show weak link effect, this...
Large mass bolometers are excellent detectors for the search of rare events, such as neutrinoless double beta decay or dark matter interactions. Currently the experiment which brought the bolometer technique to its greatest expression in terms of size and modularity, is CUORE: an array of 988 tellurium dioxide bolometers with a total active mass of 741 kg. The experiment started taking data in...
ATHENA is a large ESA mission selected for launch in 2031. One instrument of the payload is the X-IFU, a cryogenic spectrometer providing spatially resolved high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy. The core of the instrument is a 3kilo-pixels TES array operated at 50 mK thermal bath. Since the expected particle background would degrade the instrument performance, advanced reduction techniques have...
The EXperiment for Cryogenic Large-aperture Intensity Mapping (EXCLAIM) is a high altitude balloon spectrometer designed to deepen our understanding of star formation in a cosmological context. Rather than identifying individual objects, as in a galaxy redshift survey, EXCLAIM will be a pathfinder to demonstrate an intensity mapping (IM) approach. EXCLAIM will operate at 424 – 540 GHz with a...
The R(T,I,H) shape of the superconducting transition of Transition Edge Sensors (TESs) is crucial for their operation and performances. Its sharpness as a function of temperature and current influences the devices noise. Also, the behaviour of the resistance as a function of these three parameters can provide understanding of the physical phenomena governing the transition, which in turn can...
We have been developing superconducting transition-edge sensor (TES) microcalorimeters for a variety of potential astrophysics missions, including Athena. The X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) instrument on this mission includes a high density pixel array on a 0.275 mm pitch. This configuration induces electrical and thermal cross-talk between near-by pixels which need to be assessed. The...
Johnson noise thermometry is a primary measurement technique that can be used to probe the thermal transport and thermodynamic properties of hot electrons in conductors. With this technique, a hot electron bolometer (HEB), consisting of a 20 nm thick titanium (Ti) microbridge and a niobium (Nb) log spiral antenna, was developed for terahertz radiation detection. The Nb antenna with large...
We present developments in the simulation of Transition-Edge Sensor (TES) microcalorimeters under AC bias for the purpose of detector studies.
The model extends the TES differential equation system in the DC case to take into account effects of a varying TES reactance during pulses.
The impact of these effects on pulse shapes is examined using simulations based on Z(T,I) surfaces calculated...
Micro-X is projected to set world-leading limits in indirect galactic dark matter searches in a single sounding rocket flight. Micro-X's region of interest (0.5-5 keV) is of particular interest following the reported observation of an anomalous line by the X-ray satellites in this band. Following the second Micro-X flight in 2019, which will observe the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant, the...
We present a comprehensive study of current tunable kinetic inductance in Atomic Layer Deposited (ALD) Titanium Nitride (TiN) and Niobium Titanium Nitride (NbTiN) thin film devices. The utility of such current tunable kinetic inductance devices extends from parametric amplifiers, to photon detectors, to phase control circuits and detector readout circuits. We study devices made with different...
We present the concept for a resonator-based readout for Superconducting Nanowire Single Photon Detectors (SNSPDs). SNSPDs are widely implemented as photodetectors in multiple applications because of their low timing jitter, high quantum efficiency and low dark count rate. In our scheme, the shunted current from the SNSPD is not routed to the input of a low noise amplifier, but is inductively...
An innovative function, called group trigger, is implemented in a 240 pixels X-ray Transition Edge Sensors to store waveforms of both a triggered pixel and surrounding pixels. It is a useful diagnostic tool to investigate an experimental environment. It can record X-ray pulses, associated cross talk events. Under the high rate of charged particle background such as an accelerator, it enables...
The energy resolution of a single photon counting Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector (MKID) can be degraded by noise coming from the primary low temperature amplifier in the detector's readout system. Large multiplexed arrays of these detectors require high gain amplifiers which operate over a wide bandwidth and have a large dynamic range. Until recently, however, the best amplifiers...
A common approach for experiments searching for rare events relies on measuring the effects of nuclear recoils on large arrays of massive cryogenic bolometers. Coupling a very high sensitivity to an easily multiplexable readout, Kinetic Inductance Detectors are excellent candidates for these experiments.
We have thus investigated the possibility of using KIDs to readout the heat pulses...
Understanding “excess” noise in transition edge sensor microcalorimeters requires accurate models of their thermal circuit to correctly predict intrinsic noise components. Complex admittance measurements are routinely used to extract the parameters of the thermal model but can be ambiguous for complex thermal circuits. When measuring complex admittance, proper accounting for stray impedance is...
The combination of good energy resolution, high dynamic range, and large solid angle coverage has made arrays of transition-edge sensors (TES) an attractive option for x-ray spectral analysis. Because of these unique properties, we are developing a soft x-ray spectrometer that will become one of the first instruments available to scientists at the upgraded Linac Coherent Light Source...
We report on the design, commissioning, and first light measurements of the Non-destructive Statistical Estimation of Nanoscale Structures and Electronics (NSENSE) instrument developed for IARPA’s Rapid Analysis of Various Emerging Nanoelectronics (RAVEN) program. The goal of this program is to three-dimensionally image a 14 nm technology node integrated circuit (IC) with 10x10x10 nm spatial...
The isotope $^{229}$Th has the nuclear isomer state with the lowest presently known excitation energy, which possibly allows to connect the fields of nuclear and atomic physic with a potential application in a nuclear clock. In order to reduce the uncertainty of the currently most accepted value for this isomer energy, $(7.8\pm0.5)\,\mathrm{eV}$, we measure the $\gamma$-spectrum following the...
We applied a transition-edge-sensor(TES)-based X-ray spectrometer to a hadron-physics experiment at a charged-particle beam line for the first time.
An anti-kaon is the lightest meson containing a strange quark, and known to be strongly attractive to a nucleon. Therefore, anti-kaonic nuclear states have been proposed and are attracting great interest as a new form of matter and a possible...
Due to its extremely low background pressure and its cryogenic environment, the Cryogenic Storage Ring CSR at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg allows to prepare and store molecular ions with an energy of up to 300keV per unit charge in their rotational and vibrational ground state. This enables studies on electron-ion interactions such as dissociative recombination or...
As demanding applications such as x-ray spectroscopy push transition-edge sensors (TESs) to even better energy resolution, it is critical to understand all their potential noise sources. Since the early days of TESs, many groups have observed a broadband voltage noise that could not be explained by known noise mechanisms. In 2004, Ullom et al.[1] showed this unexplained noise could be...
Superconducting thin-films are central to the operation of many kinds of quantum sensors and quantum computing devices: Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KIDs), Travelling-Wave Parametric Amplifiers (TWPAs), Qubits, and Spin-based Quantum Memory devices. In all cases, the nonlinearity resulting from the supercurrent is a critical aspect of behaviour, either because it is central to the operation...
TES based detectors nowadays show performances which make them very attractive for many applications. Despite these successes, there have been many reports of excess noise in TESs which still lack physical explanation. More specifically, it is a well known experimental fact that in many cases excess noise in TESs can be described accurately by assuming an increased Johnson noise power, which...
When quasiparticles in a BCS superconductor recombine into Cooper pairs, phonons are emitted within a narrow band of energies above the pairing energy at 2$\Delta$. These phonons either further Cooper break pairs after some time, or escape to the thermal bath of the system. We show that the quasiparticle lifetime in a superconductor can be increased by more than an order of magnitude by...
By analyzing experiments on thin-film resonators of NbSi and TiN, we elucidate a decoherence mechanism at work in disordered superconductors. This decoherence is caused by charged Two Level Systems (TLS) which couple to the conduction electrons in the BCS ground state, inducing fluctuations of the kinetic inductance. Standard theories of mesoscopic disordered conductors are used to describe...
Microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) are thin film, cryogenic, superconducting resonators. Incident Cooper pair-breaking radiation increases their kinetic inductance, thereby measurably lowering their resonant frequency. For a given resonant frequency, the highest MKID responsivity is obtained by maximizing the kinetic inductance fraction $\alpha$. However, in circuits with $\alpha$...
Due to the very weak electro-acoustic coupling of graphene, the energy transfer between the electrons and the lattice is very weak. In addition, the electronic heat capacity of graphene itself is very small. Therefore, it has a wide range of application prospects in fields such as high-sensitivity, high-speed heat radiation detectors. This research raise up a new bolometer based on...
Kinetic Inductance Detector (KID) is an appealing technology due to its straightforward fabrication in comparison to other detector technologies and the possibility it offers in multiplexing large detector arrays. The proximity effect can be used to optimally tune the property of a superconductor in a superconductor-normal bilayer structure. For the first time to our knowledge, we have...
We are developing ultra-low noise transition edge sensors (TESs) for the SAFARI far-IR spectrograph, part of the cryogenically-cooled SPICA mission now in phase-A study in Europe. The sensitivity target for these devices is a per-pixel noise equivalent power (NEP) below 10^-19 WHz^-1/2. In order to fully characterize these devices, the testing environment requires sufficient suppression of...
Thermal Kinetic Inductance Detectors (TKIDs) are a promising path towards combining the excellent noise performance of traditional bolometers with an RF multiplexing architecture that enables the large detector counts needed for the next generation of millimeter wave instruments. In this work, we present dark prototype TKID pixels that achieve background limited noise performance in the 150...
Superspec is an on-chip spectrometer for millimeter and sub-millimeter spectroscopy, with large instantaneous bandwidth (190 - 310 GHz) and moderate resolution (R ∼ 300). By using an on-chip filterbank composed of microstrip resonant filters, instead of dispersive optics, and superconducting Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KIDs), Superspec is able to implement a spectrometer on less than 20...
The Next Generation Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST-TNG) is a submillimeter imaging polarimeter which will map the polarized thermal emission from interstellar dust, revealing magnetic field structures in nearby giant molecular clouds, external galaxies and the diffuse interstellar medium in three bands centered at 250, 350 and 500 microns (spatial resolution of 30,...
A wideband, large field-of-view (sub)millimeter wave imaging spectrometer is the key technology for uncovering dust-enshrouded cosmic star formation and galaxy evolution over cosmic time. Here we report the first astronomical signal captured with an integrated superconducting spectrometer (ISS): a spectrometer that uses a small superconducting integrated circuit for dispersing the signal to...
