AMKID -- a large KID-based camera at the APEX telescope

Abstract

The thermal emission at sub-millimeter wavelengths carries unique information in many astronomical applications ranging from disks and planet formation around young stars, to galaxy evolution studies at cosmological distances. Advancing on the mapping speed to detect this faint emission in ground-based astronomy has been a technical challenge for decades. The APEX Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector (AMKID) camera was designed to accomplish this task. The instrument is a wide field-of-view camera based on kinetic inductance detectors. It is installed on the 12~meter APEX telescope in Chile at 5.100~meters above see level. The instrument operates dual color, covering simultaneously the 350~GHz and 850~GHz atmospheric windows. It has a large field-of-view of 15.3'x15.3', and an unprecedented number of pixels: 13.952~detectors in the high frequency band and 3.520~detectors in the low frequency band. Here we present a complete description of the instrument design and construction together with results of the successful low frequency array (LFA) commissioning campaign executed during the last year. The LFA performance is in good agreement with design parameters, with detector sensitivity of 2.2~mK$\sqrt{s}$ and diffraction limited beam sizes of 17.0''. On-sky measurements demonstrate a sensitivity of 70-90~mJy$\sqrt{s}$ per detector when operating under good atmospheric conditions (PWV below 1.0mm). With this performance the LFA regularly achieve a mapping sensitivity of 25~mJy when mapping a square degree in an hour. AMKID on APEX with its dual color observing capabilities, high sensitivity, large field-of-view and high angular resolution holds the promise to open a new range of science with the APEX telescope.

Submitted to Astronomy & Astrophysics 17 pages, 19 figures

References in corpus (20)

• The Disk Substructures at High Angular Resolution Project (DSHARP): I. Motivation, Sample, Calibration, and Overview
• Clouds, filaments and protostars: the Herschel Hi-GAL Milky Way
• The Herschel Multi-tiered Extragalactic Survey: HerMES
• ATLASGAL - The APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy at 870 microns
• The LABOCA Survey of the Extended Chandra Deep Field South
• Experimental evidence for a surface distribution of two-level systems in superconducting lithographed microwave resonators
• The Large APEX Bolometer Camera LABOCA
• The NIKA2 large field-of-view millimeter continuum camera for the 30-m IRAM telescope
• ISM properties of a Massive Dusty Star-Forming Galaxy discovered at z ~ 7
• NIKA: A millimeter-wave kinetic inductance camera
• SONS: The JCMT legacy survey of debris discs in the submillimetre
• The Relative Performance of Filled and Feedhorn-Coupled Focal-plane Architectures
• High optical efficiency and photon noise limited sensitivity of microwave kinetic inductance detectors using phase readout
• Superconducting NbTiN Thin Films with Highly Uniform Properties over a 100 mm diameter Wafer
• LABOCA observations of nearby, active galaxies
• Photon noise from chaotic and coherent millimeter-wave sources measured with horn-coupled, aluminum lumped-element kinetic inductance detectors
• Reactive magnetron sputter deposition of superconducting niobium titanium nitride thin films with different target sizes
• Calibration scheme for large Kinetic Inductance Detector Arrays based on Readout Frequency Response
• Increased multiplexing of superconducting microresonator arrays by post-characterization adaptation of the on-chip capacitors
• Measurements and analysis of optical crosstalk in a microwave kinetic inductance detector array