11:00 am–12:00 pm ERC 401
Johannes Hubmayr (National Institute of Standards and Technology) "Cosmology as Enabled by Superconducting Detectors"
The development of Lambda-CDM big bang cosmology, a model that holds up to a vast collection of observations, is a triumph of human inquiry. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with superconducting detectors are one aspect of this on-going development that deserves attention. After sufficiently motivating the beauty of CMB anisotropies and their impact on our understanding of the birth and evolution of the universe, I will focus on how this ancient light is detected by various superconducting devices in modern instruments. The working principle of the transition edge sensor (TES) bolometer and the microwave kinetic inductance detector (MKID) will be discussed. The latest superconducting detector developments at NIST for applications in cosmology and astrophysics will be presented. These include pre-deployment status of nearly 70,000 TES bolometers and microwave SQUID readout channels for Simons Observatory; near-octave frequency scaling of CMB polarimeters; and novel approaches to maximize MKID array yield by avoiding frequency collisions.
