Our developments of cryogenic instrumentation bear on refrigeration and detectors. Following the Planck’s mission technical and scientific successes, we have then worked on the design and fabrication of a gravity insensitive, closed-cycle, 3He-4He dilution refrigerator, with performances meeting the needs of future space missions in terms of temperature and cooling power (several microwatts at 50 mK). More recently, we are developing Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KID) for future space applications in millimeter Astrophysics.
Below: the Planck historical Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) map, obtained thanks to the open-cycle space dilution.
On the detector side, we switched in 2007 from bolometers to superconducting resonators arrays (Kinetic Inductance Detectors or KID), in order to develop cameras detecting either mm-wave radiation or elementary particles, in particular for astrophysical observation of the early universe. Now we have worked on LEKID (Lumped Element KID) for space. We have demonstrated that our KID are mature to be replace the classical bolometers in terms of sensitivity and environment (e.g. radiation). See for example the following papers:
- LEKID for space applications (sensivity and environment), SPIE proceedings (2016)
- Sensitivity of LEKID in the range 60-600GHz for space applications
We are now continuing our studies on planar structures, e.g. planar mm-wave filters for on-chip spectrometers, and polarisation, e.g. spectro-OMT so including polarisation and spectral sensitivity on-pixel. This last in collaboration with Prof. A. Mennella group at the University of Milano.