No Arabic abstract
Large arrays of cryogenic sensors for various imaging applications ranging across x-ray, gamma-ray, Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), mm/sub-mm, as well as particle detection increasingly rely on superconducting microresonators for high multiplexing factors. These microresonators take the form of microwave SQUIDs that couple to Transition-Edge Sensors (TES) or Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs). In principle, such arrays can be read out with vastly scalable software-defined radio using suitable FPGAs, ADCs and DACs. In this work, we share plans and show initial results for SLAC Microresonator Radio Frequency (SMuRF) electronics, a next-generation control and readout system for superconducting microresonators. SMuRF electronics are unique in their implementation of specialized algorithms for closed-loop tone tracking, which consists of fast feedback and feedforward to each resonators excitation parameters based on transmission measurements. Closed-loop tone tracking enables improved system linearity, a significant increase in sensor count per readout line, and the possibility of overcoupled resonator designs for enhanced dynamic range. Low-bandwidth prototype electronics were used to demonstrate closed-loop tone tracking on twelve 300-kHz-wide microwave SQUID resonators, spaced at $sim$6 MHz with center frequencies $sim$5-6 GHz. We achieve multi-kHz tracking bandwidth and demonstrate that the noise floor of the electronics is subdominant to the noise intrinsic in the multiplexer.
The next generation of cryogenic CMB and submillimeter cameras under development require densely instrumented sensor arrays to meet their science goals. The readout of large numbers ($sim$10,000--100,000 per camera) of sub-Kelvin sensors, for instance as proposed for the CMB-S4 experiment, will require substantial improvements in cold and warm readout techniques. To reduce the readout cost per sensor and integration complexity, efforts are presently focused on achieving higher multiplexing density while maintaining readout noise subdominant to intrinsic detector noise. Highly-multiplexed cold readout technologies in active development include Microwave Kinetic Inductance Sensors (MKIDs) and microwave rf-SQUIDs. Both exploit the high quality factors of superconducting microwave resonators to densely channelize sub-Kelvin sensors into the bandwidth of a microwave transmission line. We present advancements in the development of a new warm readout system for microwave SQUID multiplexing, the SLAC Superconducting Microresonator RF electronics, or SMuRF. The SMuRF system is unique in its ability to track each tone, minimizing the total RF power required to read out each resonator, thereby significantly reducing the linearity requirements on the cold and warm readout. Here, we present measurements of the readout noise and linearity of the first full SMuRF system, including a demonstration of closed-loop tone tracking on a 528 channel cryogenic microwave SQUID multiplexer. SMuRF is being explored as a potential readout solution for several future CMB projects including Simons Observatory, BICEP Array, CCAT-prime, Ali-CPT, and CMB-S4. Parallel development of the platform is underway to adapt SMuRF to read out both MKID and fast X-ray TES calorimeter arrays.
Superconducting lithographed resonators have a broad range of current and potential applications in the multiplexed readout of cryogenic detectors. Here, we focus on LC bandpass filters with resonances in the 1-5 MHz range used in the transition edge sensor (TES) bolometer readout of the Simons Array cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment. In this readout scheme, each detector signal amplitude-modulates a sinusoidal carrier tone at the resonance frequency of the detectors accompanying LC filter. Many modulated signals are transmitted over the same wire pair, and quadrature demodulation recovers the complex detector signal. We observe a noise in the resonant frequencies of the LC filters, which presents primarily as a current-dependent noise in the quadrature component after demodulation. This noise has a rich phenomenology, bearing many similarities to that of two-level system (TLS) noise observed in similar resonators in the GHz regime. These similarities suggest a common physical origin, thereby offering a new regime in which the underlying physics might be probed. We further describe an observed non-orthogonality between this noise and the detector responsivities, and present laboratory measurements that bound the resulting sensitivity penalty expected in the Simons Array. From these results, we do not anticipate this noise to appreciably affect the overall Simons Array sensitivity, nor do we expect it to limit future implementations.
Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKID) are a promising solution for spaceborne mm-wave astronomy. To optimize their design and make them insensitive to the ballistic phonons created by cosmic-ray interactions in the substrate, the phonon propagation in silicon must be studied. A dedicated fast readout electronics, using channelized Digital Down Conversion for monitoring up to 12 MKIDs over a 100MHz bandwidth was developed. Thanks to the fast ADC sampling and steep digital filtering, In-phase and Quadrature samples, having a high dynamic range, are provided at ~2 Msps. This paper describes the technical solution chosen and the results obtained.
We report on the realization of a novel fiber-optic radio frequency (RF) transfer scheme with the bidirectional frequency division multiplexing (FDM) dissemination technique. Here, the proper bidirectional frequency map used in the forward and backward directions for suppressing the backscattering noise and ensuring the symmetry of the bidirectional transfer RF signals within one telecommunication channel. We experimentally demonstrated a 0.9 GHz signal transfer over a 120 km optical link with the relative frequency stabilities of 2.2E-14 at 1 s and 4.6E-17 at 20,000 s. The implementation of phase noise compensation at the remote site has the capability to perform RF transfer over a branching fiber network with the proposed technique as needed by large-scale scientific experiments.
A technological milestone for experiments employing Transition Edge Sensor (TES) bolometers operating at sub-kelvin temperature is the deployment of detector arrays with 100s--1000s of bolometers. One key technology for such arrays is readout multiplexing: the ability to read out many sensors simultaneously on the same set of wires. This paper describes a frequency-domain multiplexed readout system which has been developed for and deployed on the APEX-SZ and South Pole Telescope millimeter wavelength receivers. In this system, the detector array is divided into modules of seven detectors, and each bolometer within the module is biased with a unique ~MHz sinusoidal carrier such that the individual bolometer signals are well separated in frequency space. The currents from all bolometers in a module are summed together and pre-amplified with Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs) operating at 4 K. Room-temperature electronics demodulate the carriers to recover the bolometer signals, which are digitized separately and stored to disk. This readout system contributes little noise relative to the detectors themselves, is remarkably insensitive to unwanted microphonic excitations, and provides a technology pathway to multiplexing larger numbers of sensors.