ARCONS: A highly multiplexed superconducting optical to near-IR camera

Abstract

We report on the development of ARCONS, the ARray Camera for Optical to Near-IR Spectrophotometry. This photon counting integral field unit (IFU), being built at UCSB and Caltech with detectors fabricated at JPL, will use a unique, highly multiplexed low temperature detector technology known as Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs). These detectors, which operate at 100 mK, should provide photon counting with energy resolution of R = E/δE > 20 and time resolution of a microsecond, with a quantum efficiency of around 50%. We expect to field the instrument at the Palomar 200" telescope in the first quarter of 2011 with an array containing 1024 pixels in a 32x32 pixel form factor to yield a field of view of approximately 10x10 arcseconds. The bandwidth of the camera is limited by the rising sky count rate at longer wavelengths, but we anticipate a bandwidth of 0.35 to 1.35 μm will be achievable. A simple optical path and compact dewar utilizing a cryogen-free adiabatic demagnetization refridgerator (ADR) allows the camera to be deployed quickly at Naysmith or Coude foci at a variety of telescopes. A highly expandable software defined radio (SDR) readout that can scale up to much larger arrays has been developed.

10 pages, 5 figures. To appear in Proc. SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation, San Diego, 2010

References in corpus (5)

• Detection of 16 Gamma-Ray Pulsars Through Blind Frequency Searches Using the Fermi LAT
• Titanium Nitride Films for Ultrasensitive Microresonator Detectors
• Rapid optical and X-ray timing observations of GX 339-4: flux correlations at the onset of a low/hard state
• A Position Sensitive X-ray Spectrophotometer using Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors
• SWIFT J1753.5-0127: a surprising optical/X-ray cross-correlation function

Cited by in corpus (12)

• A readout for large arrays of Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors
• Operation of a titanium nitride superconducting microresonator detector in the nonlinear regime
• Frequency-Multiplexed bias and readout of a 16-pixel Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detector Array
• Crosstalk Reduction for Superconducting Microwave Resonator Arrays
• MAKO: a pathfinder instrument for on-sky demonstration of low-cost 350 micron imaging arrays
• Direct Detection of SDSS J0926+3624 Orbital Expansion with ARCONS
• Counting of Hong-Ou-Mandel Bunched Optical Photons Using a Fast Pixel Camera
• Final results of CALDER: Kinetic inductance light detectors to search for rare events
• Phonon and light read out of a Li${}_2$MoO${}_4$ crystal with multiplexed kinetic inductance detectors
• A frequency and sensitivity tunable microresonator array for high-speed quantum processor readout
• Giga-z: A 100,000 Object Superconducting Spectrophotometer for LSST Follow-up
• ARCONS: a highly multiplexed superconducting UV to near-IR camera