NIKONA is a revolutionary project, devoted to change our views of the millimetric Universe. It is driven by Alessandro MONFARDINI (Néel) and Juan MACIAS-PEREZ (LPSC), 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
