McCarrick H, Flanigan D, Jones G, Johnson B R, Ade P, Araujo D, Bradford K, Cantor R, Che G, Day P, Doyle S, Leduc H, Limon M, Luu V, Mauskopf P, Miller A, Mroczkowski T, Tucker C, Zmuidzinas J
Department of Physics, Columbia University, New York, New York 10025, USA.
School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales CF24 3AA, United Kingdom.
Rev Sci Instrum. 2014 Dec;85(12):123117. doi: 10.1063/1.4903855.
We discuss the design, fabrication, and testing of prototype horn-coupled, lumped-element kinetic inductance detectors (LEKIDs) designed for cosmic microwave background studies. The LEKIDs are made from a thin aluminum film deposited on a silicon wafer and patterned using standard photolithographic techniques at STAR Cryoelectronics, a commercial device foundry. We fabricated 20-element arrays, optimized for a spectral band centered on 150 GHz, to test the sensitivity and yield of the devices as well as the multiplexing scheme. We characterized the detectors in two configurations. First, the detectors were tested in a dark environment with the horn apertures covered, and second, the horn apertures were pointed towards a beam-filling cryogenic blackbody load. These tests show that the multiplexing scheme is robust and scalable, the yield across multiple LEKID arrays is 91%, and the measured noise-equivalent temperatures for a 4 K optical load are in the range 26±6 μK√s.
