Preflight Detector Characterization of BLAST-TNG
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Preflight Detector Characterization of BLAST‑TNG Sam Gordon1 · Adrian Sinclair1 · Philip Mauskopf1,2 · Gabriele Coppi3 · Mark Devlin3 · Bradley Dober4 · Laura Fissel5 · Nicholas Galitzki6 · Jiansong Gao4 · Johannes Hubmayr4 · Nathan Lourie3 · Ian Lowe3 · Christopher McKenney4 · Federico Nati7 · Javier Romualdez3 Received: 8 August 2019 / Accepted: 29 March 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The Next-Generation Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST-TNG) is a submillimeter imaging polarimeter which will map the polarized thermal emission from interstellar dust, revealing magnetic field structures in nearby giant molecular clouds, external galaxies and the diffuse interstellar medium in three bands centered at 250, 350 and 500-μm (spatial resolution of 30″, 41″ and 59″). Its camera contains over 2500 dual-polarization sensitive lumped element kinetic inductance detectors, which are read out using field-programmable gate array-based readout electronics. BLAST-TNG was scheduled for a 28-day Antarctic flight during the 2018/2019 summer season, but unfavorable weather conditions pushed the anticipated flight to 2019/2020. We present a summary of key results from the 2018/2019 preflight characterization of the detector and receiver. Included in this summary are detector yields, estimates of in-flight sensitivity, a measurement of the optical passbands and estimates of polarization efficiency. Keywords LEKIDs · Detector readout · Submillimeter astrophysics
* Sam Gordon [email protected] 1
School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA
2
Department of Physics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA
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Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
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National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, CO 80305, USA
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National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA
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Department of Physics, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
7
Physics Department, University of Milano-Bicocca, 20126 Milan, Italy
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Low Temperature Physics
1 Introduction The Next-Generation Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST-TNG) is a submillimeter (sub-mm) imaging polarimeter which will map the polarized thermal emission from interstellar dust, revealing magnetic field structures in nearby giant molecular clouds, the diffuse interstellar medium and nearby external galaxies [1]. BLAST-TNG will observe in three 30% bands centered at 250, 350 and 500-μm (1200, 857 and 600 GHz), with diffraction-limited spatial resolution of 30″, 41″ and 59″ provided by an underfilled 2.5-m aperture primary mirror. Its sub-Kelvin receiver contains over 2500 dual-polarization sensitive horn-coupled lumped-element kinetic inductance detectors (LEKIDs) which are distributed between five readout chains: three for the 250-μm band and one each for the 350-μm and 500-μm bands. The three 250-μm readout
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