A Retrospective on the Design and Characterization of Simons Observatory’s Detectors

Jun 07, 2024 - 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm
Location

SLAC, Kavli 2nd Floor Conf. Room

Speaker
Rita Sonka (Princeton University) In Person and zoom

Zoom info: https://stanford.zoom.us/j/868697145

Please email mmebrat1@stanford.edu for zoom password.

About 13.7 billion years ago, the opaque plasma saturating the universe cooled enough to combine into neutral atoms, becoming transparent and releasing the oldest light visible today, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This relic radiation contains clues to the universe’s beginning, contents, evolution, and more. However, redshifting from the expansion of the universe has rendered the CMB a faint 2.7 K blackbody spectrum with even fainter variations, requiring many extremely sensitive, close-packed detectors with sophisticated readout to probe it further. In this talk I’ll review the development of such detectors for the Simon Observatory collaboration, going through the cycle of specifying these detectors' parameters, building the equipment to efficiently test them, doing that testing en masse, and improving the techniques used to do so that ultimately brought SO’s tens of thousands of detectors from concept to deployment-ready devices.