Superconducting camera

Abstract: We have been developed a lens-integrated superconducting camera for millimeter and submillimeter astronomy. High-purity silicon (Si) is suitable for the lens array of the microwave kinetic inductance detector camera due to its high refractive index and low dielectric loss at low temperatures. The camera is an antenna-coupled Al coplanar waveguide on a Si substrate. Thus the lens and the device are made of the same material. We report a fabrication method of a 721-pixel Si lens array with an antireflection (AR) coating. The Si lens array was fabricated with an ultraprecision cutting machine. It uses TiAlN-coated carbide end mills attached with a high-speed spindle. The shape accuracy was less than 50 μm peak-to-valley and the surface roughness was arithmetic average roughness (Ra) of 1.8 μm. The mixed epoxy was used as an AR coating to adjust the refractive index. It was shaved to yield a thickness of 185 μm for 220 GHz. Narrow grooves were made between the lenses to prevent cracking due to the different thermal expansion coefficients of Si and the epoxy. The surface roughness of the AR coating was Ra of 2.4 to 4.2 μm.

Abstract: Aims. In 2006 comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, which split in 1995 into five pieces, approached the Sun again with a swarm of new fragments. The same year in May, the conglomerate of sub-fragments from the original fragment B was observed with the SCam3 instrument mounted on the 1-m ESA Optical Ground Station (OGS) telescope in Tenerife, Spain. With a total FOV of ∼876 km × 730 km and a spatial resolution of ∼73 km/pixel, the S-Cam3 observations provided the possibility to examine dust fragmentation processes, as well as dust and gas outflow, within the first few hundred kilometres of the sub-fragment surfaces. Methods. The superconducting camera, S-Cam3, is an ultra-fast photon counting camera developed by ESA. Cooled to ∼0.3 K, its sensitive superconducting tunnel junction sensors detect single photons, measuring their arrival time to accuracies of microseconds and determining its crude wavelength. The camera is also essentially noise-free except for sky background photons. Thus S-Cam3 essentially provides high-speed, low-resolution spectra between 395 nm and 1052 nm with a resolution of ∼35 nm at 500 nm wavelength. Results. The images acquired show three intensity maxima that were identified as most likely from the B fragment itself and two clusters of sub-fragments 253 km and 896 km away from fragment B. Furthermore we could see spatial intensity variations on short time scales (2–4 min), indicating the varying dust and gas emission of “subnuclei”. The gas and dust profiles do not show an inverse radial distribution (1/r) in all flow directions, but rather a clear deviation from a free radial outflow. This most likely is due to the gas outflow of one cluster of sub-fragments hitting the outflow of the other cluster. In other words, the material is expanding from one cluster into the other. In addition, the dust particles continue to fragment.

Abstract: We designed wide FoV (1 degree) Nasmyth optics which transformed the f/6 Nasmyth focus to f/1 at a 850GHz superconducting camera for a planning 10-m Ritchey-Chretien telescope. This optical system consists of reflecting mirrors at room temperature and a refractive lens at 4K. It enables us to carry out wide FoV imaging observations at the diffraction limit (Strehl ratio < 0.89) with a more than 100,000 pixel camera equipped in a 10-m telescope. The size of this system is reasonably compact (whole size:1.6 mx3.3 mx2.6 m, cryogenic part:0.7 mx0.7 mx1.0 m). The cryogenic part of this system such as vacuum window, cryogenic lens and IR block filters can be made with existing technologies at reasonable cost. The optical system can extend to the millimeter wave and the terahertz domain.

Abstract: Mazin Lab at UCSB is developing MKID instrument for astronomy at near infrared, optical and ultraviolet wavelength. We use MIKDs as single photon detectors by measuring the arrival time of incoming photons with an accuracy of a few microseconds and with a relatively high energy resolution (R~10 at 1um). We fabricate kilopixels array of MKIDs and we incorporate them in our own instruments for UVOIR astronomy with the main application being exoplanets direct imaging. We present the work being made in our lab in the development and fabrication of 10 to 20k pixels arrays for the DARKNESS (Dark-speckle Near-IR Energy-resolved Superconducting Spectrophotometer) and MEC (MKID Exoplanet Camera) instruments, respectively. The 6-step fabrication process has been upgraded over the last months in order to improve the sensitivity of the arrays. The detectors are made of platinum silicide (PtSi) since MKIDs with very high internal quality factor have been successfully fabricated from this material. Furthermore, PtSi with very uniform superconducting properties over 4inch substrate are much more easier to deposit than the regular TiN used in most existing MKIDs technology. Among various upgrades, we coated the PtSi sensitive area with a SiO2/Ta2O5 bi-layer in order to reduce the reflection of optical photons hitting the detectors. The light absorption is increased by a factor of 2 in the instruments bandwidth. The DARKNESS instrument has been successfully commissioned last summer and MEC, the world largest superconducting camera, is installed at the Subaru telescope since the beginning of the year. Our effort leads to the fabrication of arrays of detectors with a median internal quality factor of 100 000 with an energy resolution of 10 at 1um and a pixel yield approaching 95%. In addition, we will present new MKID design in which the conventional meander inductor and interdigitated capacitor are replaced by a square inductor and a large parallel plate capacitor made of two metal plates separated by a ~10-nm thick dielectric layer. This parallel plate design allows us to drive the MKIDs at a higher power, which in turns should increase the sensitivity of the detectors. Following promising results from our first design, second generation of parallel plate MKID devices have been made from Hf/HfO2/Nb tri-layers deposited in-sit. We obtained high quality factor from the parallel plate MKIDs and we were able to detect photons with this new MKIDs design. Another way to improve the sensitivity of MKIDs is to use a low Tc material, compared to Tc ~ 1K usually used. We fabricated MKIDs arrays with superconducting Hafnium, Tc = 450mK, and we demonstrated that resonators with very high internal quality factors Qi~300 000 and an energy resolution of 9 at 808nm can be achieved.