Kinetic Inductance Detectors for the OLIMPO experiment: in--flight operation and performance

Abstract

We report on the performance of lumped--elements Kinetic Inductance Detector (KID) arrays for mm and sub--mm wavelengths, operated at 0.3K during the stratospheric flight of the OLIMPO payload, at an altitude of 37.8 km. We find that the detectors can be tuned in-flight, and their performance is robust against radiative background changes due to varying telescope elevation. We also find that the noise equivalent power of the detectors in flight is significantly reduced with respect to the one measured in the laboratory, and close to photon-noise limited performance. The effect of primary cosmic rays crossing the detector is found to be consistent with the expected ionization energy loss with phonon-mediated energy transfer from the ionization sites to the resonators. In the OLIMPO detector arrays, at float, cosmic ray events affect less than 4% of the detector samplings for all the pixels of all the arrays, and less than 1% of the samplings for most of the pixels. These results are also representative of what one can expect from primary cosmic rays in a satellite mission with similar KIDs and instrument environment.

References in corpus (5)

• The NIKA2 large field-of-view millimeter continuum camera for the 30-m IRAM telescope
• Mitigation of Cosmic Ray Effect on Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector Arrays
• Polarimetry at millimeter wavelengths with the NIKA camera: calibration and performance
• Kinetic Inductance Detectors and readout electronics for the OLIMPO experiment
• Study of Cosmic Ray Impact on Planck/HFI Low Temperature Detectors

Cited by in corpus (10)

• The Canfranc Axion Detection Experiment (CADEx): Search for axions at 90 GHz with Kinetic Inductance Detectors
• Applications for Microwave Kinetic Induction Detectors in Advanced Instrumentation
• In-flight performance of the LEKIDs of the OLIMPO experiment
• Accurate sky signal reconstruction for ground-based spectroscopy with kinetic inductance detectors
• The long duration cryogenic system of the OLIMPO balloon--borne experiment: design and in--flight performance
• Total power horn-coupled 150 GHz LEKID array for space applications
• OLIMPO: a Balloon-Borne SZE Imager to Probe ICM Dynamics and the WHIM
• Cosmic ray susceptibility of the Terahertz Intensity Mapper detector arrays
• Cosmic backgrounds from the radio to the far-infrared: recent results and perspectives from cosmological and astrophysical surveys
• Operational Optimization to Maximize Dynamic Range in EXCLAIM Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors