Themes


KID arrays

One of the fundamental assets of KIDs is that they can be easily multiplexed, reading out hundreds of pixels with a single feedline.
While this is true on paper, actually achieving large format arrays, with thousands of good working pixels, remains a challenging task. The GIS collaboration has been working in this direction constantly over more than a decade, passing from the tens or hundreds of pixels per array of the NIKA camera, to 1000 pixels per array in NIKA2 and 2000 in CONCERTO. (…)

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Silicon lenses

In the recent years our collaboration acquired a lot of experience in the design and fabrication of plastic lenses (High Density Polyethylene and Polypropylene) currently used in instruments such as NIKA2, KISS and CONCERTO.
However, for the next generation instruments we need to develop higher Field-of-View and consequently larger lenses up to a diameter of the order of 300-400 mm.
For such large optical elements, plastic is no longer a suitable material because of its low refractive (…)

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On-chip spectroscopy

The development of KID based spectroscopy aims to provide different technological options to study millimeter waves at different energy resolutions R=Δν/ν ranging from 10 to 10,000.
Among other astrophysical challenges, two are of greater importance to us.
The first is to separate the so called B modes of the Cosmic Microwave Background polarization from those of the foreground emission of galactic dust and synchrotron.
The second is to map the intensity fluctuations of the Carbon II (…)

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Readout electronics

The readout electronics, designed to be hosted in rugged micro-TCA crates, can probe up to 400 KID per readout card over a large bandwidth (950 MHz).
A microTCA can host up to 12 of these boards and each board uses less than 40W. Each readout board heavily relies on the use of a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and fast digital to analog and digital to analog converters (2 Gigasamples per second).
The radiofrequency front-end is in charge of performing the up and down conversion of (…)

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