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| Paper: |
Superconducting Bolometer Arrays for Far-Infrared and Submillimeter Astronomy |
| Volume: |
217, Imaging at Radio Through Submillimeter Wavelengths |
| Page: |
134 |
| Authors: |
Benford, D. J.; Allen, Christine A.; Chervenak, J. A.; Grossman, E. N.; Irwin, K. D.; Kutyrev, A. S.; Martinis, J. M.; Moseley, S. H.; Shafer, R. A.; Reintsema, C. D. |
| Abstract: |
Studies of astrophysical emission in the far-infrared and submillimeter will increasingly require large arrays of detectors containing hundreds to thousands of elements. The last few years have seen the increasing from one to a few tens of bolometers on ground-based telescopes (e.g., CSO - SHARC (Wang et al. 1996), JCMT - SCUBA (Holland et al. 1996), IRAM 30m (Kreysa et al. 1998)). A further jump of this magnitude, to a thousand bolometers, requires a fundamental redesign of the technology of making bolometer arrays. One method of achieving this increase is to design bolometers which can be packed into a rectangular array of near-unity filling factor while Nyquist-sampling the focal plane of the telescope at the operating wavelengths. A multiplexed readout is necessary for this many detectors, and can be developed using SQUIDs such that a 32 × 32 array of bolometers could be read out using 100 wires rather than the >2000 needed with a brute force expansion of existing arrays. We describe a collaborative effort currently underway at NASA/Goddard and NIST to bring about the first prototypes of such arrays containing tens of bolometers. This technology is well-suited to low-background instruments such as SPIRE on FIRST and SAFIRE on SOFIA, and can also be used in broadband, high-background instruments such as HAWC on SOFIA. |
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