Speaker
Description
Future mm-wave cosmological surveys need mega-detector focal planes to confirm or rule out defining theories for the missing cornerstones of modern cosmology. Microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) can straightforwardly scale to large-format detector arrays, including photometer arrays and on-chip filter-bank spectrometers. This talk will present a suite of optimization efforts toward the next-generation MKIDs-based detector arrays. I will report the separation and tuning of detector noise components that resulted in photon noise-limited detectors. The optical efficiency, detector quality factor, and spectrometer resolution depend on dielectric loss. I will discuss our low-loss dielectrics and their loss tangent measurements from centimeter to millimeter wavelengths. Reliable galvanic contact between the niobium capacitor and aluminum inductor in our detector is a third challenge that we overcome by capping the niobium with a niobium nitride layer before depositing aluminum. These efforts have led to photon-noise-limited photometers with high optical efficiency and paved the way for our next-generation spectrometers.
