NIKONA is a revolutionary project, devoted to change our views of the millimetric Universe. It is driven by Alessandro MONFARDINI, and supported by IRAM and its partners MPG, CNRS, IGN, and seeking for funding. The idea is based on a series of feasibilities studied performed on detectors, optics, electronics. They all converge to demonstrate that the project was ready for submission.
GOAL: to design, build, and install around 2030, at the 30-meter IRAM telescope a 20,000 pixels four-colours mm-wave camera able also to map the polarisation simultaneously in each band. This camera will represent a 10-fold improvement in mapping speed at high angular resolution with respect to the state-of-the-art that is currently represented by NIKA2 at 250 GHz and 150 GHz. This will represent a transformative leap allowing to investigate the cosmic evolution during cosmic morning (z > 4) with unprecedented solid statistics. For example, the sources-discovery-rate is of around 1 per hour of observation in NIKA2. It will be boosted to 10 per hour, with in additional increased significance thanks to the 4-color maps, allowing to feed a lot of wonderful possible targets to ALMA and NOEMA. NIKONA might also include for the first time a large field-of-view (above 1,000 beams) on-chip spectrometer based on our new HYPKID technology.
Below: detectors R&D for NIKONA: the HYPerspectral KID (HYPKID) at 200-240 GHz
