Speaker
Description
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 hours of flight, detectors were tuned, and their large dynamic range was confirmed, using variations of the radiative background due to changes of the elevation of the telescope boresight and the insertion of the plug-in room-temperature differential Fourier transform spectrometer into the optical chain.
The noise equivalent power of the detectors was measured and found to be close to be photon-noise limited (81, 30, 69, and 67 ${\rm\mu K/\sqrt{Hz}}$ at 150, 250, 350 and 460 GHz respectively), and significantly reduced with respect to laboratory measurements. Moreover, we demonstrated that signal contamination due to primary cosmic rays hitting the arrays is less than 4% of the data for all the pixels of all the arrays, and less than 1% for most of the pixels.
These results can be considered a first step of KID technology validation in a representative near-space environment.
| Student (Ph.D., M.Sc. or B.Sc.) | N |
|---|---|
| Less than 5 years of experience since completion of Ph.D | Y |
