Kinetic Inductance Detectors and readout electronics for the OLIMPO experiment

Abstract

Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KIDs) are superconductive low$-$temperature detectors useful for astrophysics and particle physics. We have developed arrays of lumped elements KIDs (LEKIDs) sensitive to microwave photons, optimized for the four horn-coupled focal planes of the OLIMPO balloon-borne telescope, working in the spectral bands centered at 150 GHz, 250 GHz, 350 GHz, and 460 GHz. This is aimed at measuring the spectrum of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect for a number of galaxy clusters, and will validate LEKIDs technology in a space-like environment. Our detectors are optimized for an intermediate background level, due to the presence of residual atmosphere and room--temperature optical system and they operate at a temperature of 0.3 K. The LEKID planar superconducting circuits are designed to resonate between 100 and 600 MHz, and to match the impedance of the feeding waveguides; the measured quality factors of the resonators are in the $10^4-10^5$ range, and they have been tuned to obtain the needed dynamic range. The readout electronics is composed of a $cold$ $part$, which includes a low noise amplifier, a dc$-$block, coaxial cables, and power attenuators; and a $room-temperature$ $part$, FPGA$-$based, including up and down-conversion microwave components (IQ modulator, IQ demodulator, amplifiers, bias tees, attenuators). In this contribution, we describe the optimization, fabrication, characterization and validation of the OLIMPO detector system.

Proceedings of WOLTE13, September 10-13, 2018 Sorrento, Italy

References in corpus (11)

• Planck 2015 results. XIII. Cosmological parameters
• Exploring Cosmic Origins with CORE: Survey requirements and mission design
• BICEP2 / Keck Array VIII: Measurement of gravitational lensing from large-scale B-mode polarization
• Exploring Cosmic Origins with CORE: The Instrument
• Low-resolution spectroscopy of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect and estimates of cluster parameters
• Exploring Cosmic Origins with CORE: Extragalactic sources in Cosmic Microwave Background maps
• Polarimetry at millimeter wavelengths with the NIKA camera: calibration and performance
• Exploring Cosmic Origins with CORE: Cluster Science
• Kinetic Inductance Detectors for the OLIMPO experiment: design and pre-flight characterization
• Development of Lumped Element Kinetic Inductance Detectors for the W-Band
• Efficient Differential Fourier-Transform Spectrometer for precision Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect measurements

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Kinetic Inductance Detectors for the OLIMPO experiment: in--flight operation and performance
• In-flight performance of the LEKIDs of the OLIMPO experiment
• Accurate sky signal reconstruction for ground-based spectroscopy with kinetic inductance detectors
• Total power horn-coupled 150 GHz LEKID array for space applications
• Cosmic backgrounds from the radio to the far-infrared: recent results and perspectives from cosmological and astrophysical surveys