Recipient organisationCardiff UniversitySource-published name: Cardiff University
Funding£898K
PeriodJun 2025 — Jun 2028
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Future telescopes will need detector arrays a thousand times larger than today’s—and this project aims to build them. Current millimetre and sub-millimetre telescopes face a trade-off: they can either map large areas of sky at low resolution, like the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, or zoom in on small patches at high resolution, like ALMA. Neither can do both at once. This limits astronomers’ ability to study how stars form and how galaxies evolve across cosmic time. The proposed Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (AtLAST) would break that limit, but only if it can field roughly 1,000 times more detectors than existing instruments. The team plans to develop superconducting Kinetic Inductance Detector arrays that solve three bottlenecks: packing more detectors onto each readout channel, eliminating cryogenic amplifiers that add heat to the instrument, and building flexible readout electronics that can adapt to changing sky conditions in real time. If successful, this would give UK astronomers the tools to image large swaths of the sky at high resolution for the first time. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application. But past advances in detector technology for astronomy have fed directly into medical imaging, security scanners, and telecommunications.
View original technical description
Our aim is to develop arrays of superconducting Kinetic Inductance Detectors beyond the current state-of-the-art for use with future millimetre and sub-millimetre observatories. Future large aperture ground-based mm/sub mm telescopes are crucial for progressing our understanding of star formation and galaxy evolution enabling statistically significant surveys of the high-z universe beyond the confusion limit and high spatial resolution observations of star formation regions in the local group. Current facilities such as the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) are limited large area mapping speed while large field of view telescopes such as the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and future Simons observatory are limited in angular resolution. Therefore, future observatories such as the Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (AtLAST) will provide the essential capabilities to further our understanding of cosmology and astrophysics. However, such observatories will require of order 1000 times the number of detectors fielded on current telescopes of this type. This is significant technological challenge that requires immediate development effort. Building upon experience with detector array development using Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs), we plan to develop detectors with i) the capability of increasing multiplexing ratios (number of detectors read out on a single channel), ii) removing the need for cryogenic amplifiers that add significant heat load to cryogenic instruments when used in large numbers, and iii) developing new readout electronics that exploits advances in the field of commercially available microwave electronics and offers a route to increased multiplexing ratios along with the ability to adjust readout tuning on the fly to adapt to changing observing conditions. Our vision is to prove this approach in a timely manner for the UK’s involvement in new instrumentation on current and future observatories providing astronomers with the instrumentation required to advance current understanding limited by our capability to image large areas of sky at sufficient resolution at millimetre and sub-millimetre wavelengths.
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