In-flight performance of the LEKIDs of the OLIMPO experiment

Abstract

We describe the in-flight performance of the horn-coupled Lumped Element Kinetic Inductance Detector arrays of the balloon-borne OLIMPO experiment. These arrays have been designed to match the spectral bands of OLIMPO: 150, 250, 350, and 460 GHz, and they have been operated at 0.3 K and at an altitude of 37.8 km during the stratospheric flight of the OLIMPO payload, in Summer 2018. During the first hours of flight, we tuned the detectors and verified their large dynamics under the radiative background variations due to elevation increase of the telescope and to the insertion of the plug-in room-temperature differential Fourier transform spectrometer into the optical chain. We have found that the detector noise equivalent powers are close to be photon-noise limited and lower than those measured on the ground. Moreover, the data contamination due to primary cosmic rays hitting the arrays is less than 3% for all the pixels of all the arrays, and less than 1% for most of the pixels. These results can be considered the first step of KID technology validation in a representative space environment.

References in corpus (4)

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

Cited by in corpus (4)

• 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
• A kinetic inductance detectors array design for high background conditions at 150 GHz
• Cosmic ray susceptibility of the Terahertz Intensity Mapper detector arrays