Preflight Characterization of the BLAST-TNG Receiver and Detector Arrays

Abstract

The Next Generation Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST-TNG) is a submillimeter mapping experiment planned for a 28 day long-duration balloon (LDB) flight from McMurdo Station, Antarctica during the 2018-2019 season. BLAST-TNG will detect submillimeter polarized interstellar dust emission, tracing magnetic fields in galactic molecular clouds. BLAST-TNG will be the first polarimeter with the sensitivity and resolution to probe the $\sim$0.1 parsec-scale features that are critical to understanding the origin of structures in the interstellar medium. BLAST-TNG features three detector arrays operating at wavelengths of 250, 350, and 500 $\mu$m (1200, 857, and 600 GHz) comprised of 918, 469, and 272 dual-polarization pixels, respectively. Each pixel is made up of two crossed microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs). These arrays are cooled to 275 mK in a cryogenic receiver. Each MKID has a different resonant frequency, allowing hundreds of resonators to be read out on a single transmission line. This inherent ability to be frequency-domain multiplexed simplifies the cryogenic readout hardware, but requires careful optical testing to map out the physical location of each resonator on the focal plane. Receiver-level optical testing was carried out using both a cryogenic source mounted to a movable xy-stage with a shutter, and a beam-filling, heated blackbody source able to provide a 10-50 ${}^{\circ }$C temperature chop. The focal plane array noise properties, responsivity, polarization efficiency, instrumental polarization were measured. We present the preflight characterization of the BLAST-TNG cryogenic system and array-level optical testing of the MKID detector arrays in the flight receiver.

arXiv comment15 pages, 7 figures, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation Conference

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• A Decade of SCUBA-2: A Comprehensive Guide to Calibrating 450 $\mu$m and 850 $\mu$m Continuum Data at the JCMT
• Applications for Microwave Kinetic Induction Detectors in Advanced Instrumentation
• Kinetic Inductance Detectors for the OLIMPO experiment: in--flight operation and performance
• The Experiment for Cryogenic Large-aperture Intensity Mapping (EXCLAIM)
• Broadband, millimeter-wave anti-reflective structures on sapphire ablated with femto-second laser
• Design and Characterization of a Balloon-Borne Diffraction-Limited Submillimeter Telescope Platform for BLAST-TNG
• The BLAST Observatory: A Sensitivity Study for Far-IR Balloon-borne Polarimeters
• Fabrication Development for SPT-SLIM, a Superconducting Spectrometer for Line Intensity Mapping