Impact of particles on the Planck HFI detectors: Ground-based measurements and physical interpretation

Abstract

The Planck High Frequency Instrument (HFI) surveyed the sky continuously from August 2009 to January 2012. Its noise and sensitivity performance were excellent, but the rate of cosmic ray impacts on the HFI detectors was unexpectedly high. Furthermore, collisions of cosmic rays with the focal plane produced transient signals in the data (glitches) with a wide range of characteristics. A study of cosmic ray impacts on the HFI detector modules has been undertaken to categorize and characterize the glitches, to correct the HFI time-ordered data, and understand the residual effects on Planck maps and data products. This paper presents an evaluation of the physical origins of glitches observed by the HFI detectors. In order to better understand the glitches observed by HFI in flight, several ground-based experiments were conducted with flight-spare HFI bolometer modules. The experiments were conducted between 2010 and 2013 with HFI test bolometers in different configurations using varying particles and impact energies. The bolometer modules were exposed to 23 MeV protons from the Orsay IPN TANDEM accelerator, and to ${}^{241}$Am and ${}^{244}$Cm $\alpha$-particle and ${}^{55}$Fe radioactive X-ray sources. The calibration data from the HFI ground-based preflight tests were used to further characterize the glitches and compare glitch rates with statistical expectations under laboratory conditions. Test results provide strong evidence that the dominant family of glitches observed in flight are due to cosmic ray absorption by the silicon die substrate on which the HFI detectors reside. Glitch energy is propagated to the thermistor by ballistic phonons, while there is also a thermal diffusion contribution. The implications of these results for future satellite missions, especially those in the far-infrared to sub-millimetre and millimetre regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, are discussed.

11 pages, 13 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Planck 2013 results. I. Overview of products and scientific results
• Planck 2013 results X. Energetic particle effects: characterization, removal, and simulation
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• Mitigation of Cosmic Ray Effect on Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector Arrays
• Measurements and simulations of athermal phonon transmission from silicon absorbers to aluminium sensors
• Kinetic Inductance Detectors for the OLIMPO experiment: in--flight operation and performance
• Thermal Kinetic Inductance Detectors for millimeter-wave detection
• Silicon-Based Antenna-Coupled Polarization-Sensitive Millimeter-Wave Bolometer Arrays for Cosmic Microwave Background Instruments
• Lumped element kinetic inductance detectors maturity for space-borne instruments in the range between 80 and 180 GHz
• High-energy interactions in Kinetic Inductance Detectors arrays
• A new pulse shape description for $\alpha$ particle pulses in a highly-sensitive sub-Kelvin bolometer
• Simulations of systematic effects arising from cosmic rays in the LiteBIRD space telescope, and effects on the measurements of CMB $B$-modes
• Particle response of antenna-coupled TES arrays: results from SPIDER and the lab
• Cold-electron bolometers for future mm and sub-mm sky surveys
• Building the analytical response in frequency domain of AC biased bolometers Application to Planck/HFI