Understanding Pulsar Emission with ARCONS, the first ground-based instrument to use revolutionary cryogenic detectors

该奖项资助使用PI开发的新仪器进行天文观测，使用加州的Palomar 200英寸和Shane 3米望远镜。该仪器被称为用于光学到近红外分光光度法的阵列相机（ARCONS），是新一代天文仪器中的第一个，该仪器使用了最近开发的超导探测器技术：微波动力学电感探测器（MKID）。 MKID可以取代紫外、光学和近红外波段的半导体和微通道板探测器，并有可能使天文学的几乎每一个分支受益。 PI和他的团队将使用ARCONS来获得光学双星的时间和能量分辨成像，光学双星是一种高度磁化的旋转中子星星，会发出一束光。 中子星是城市大小的物体，由超新星爆炸期间大质量恒星的引力坍缩形成。光学光谱变化太快，以至于电荷耦合器件（CCD）无法准确记录，CCD是目前占主导地位的天文探测器。这些观测将有助于更好地理解主导脉冲星发射的复杂物理，也有助于为天体物理学的其他领域开辟这种探测器的新应用。PI还将培训和指导一名研究生进行仪器，实验和观察技术的研究。MKID阵列是近乎理想的光子传感器，能够测量每个入射光子的能量（到百分之几）和到达时间（微秒），并针对近红外和光学（3，500 - 13，500埃）波长进行了优化。它们没有读取噪声或暗电流，完美的宇宙射线抑制，非常适合测量快速变化的源。观测和分析将用于提高对射电和光学辐射之间联系的理解，在微弱的已知光学射电星PSR B 0656 +14和Geminga中寻找光谱变化作为相位的函数，并通过在孤立和二进制毫秒射电星中寻找脉动来打开一个新的时间机制。

This award funds work to use a new instrument developed by the PI for astronomical observations with the Palomar 200-inch and Shane 3-m telescopes in California. The instrument is called the ARray Camera for Optical to Near-IR Spectrophotometry (ARCONS), and is the first of a new generation of astronomical instrumentation that uses a recently developed superconducting detector technology: Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs). MKIDs may replace semiconductor and microchannel plate detectors in the UV, optical, and near-IR wavelength bands, and have the potential to benefit nearly every branch of astronomy. The PI and his team will use ARCONS to obtain time and energy resolved imaging of optical pulsars, a highly magnetized, rotating neutron star that emits a beam of light. Neutron stars are city-sized objects that form out of the gravitational collapse of massive stars during a supernova explosion. Optical pulsars change too quickly to be accurately recorded by charge-coupled devices (CCDs), which are currently the dominant astronomical detector. These observations will be useful for better understanding the complicated physics that dominates pulsar emission, and also help open new applications of this detector for other fields of astrophysics. The PI will also train and mentor a graduate student in research with instrumentation, experimental and observational techniques. MKID arrays are nearly ideal photon sensors, capable of measuring the energy (to several percent) and the arrival time to a microsecond of each incoming photon, optimized for near infrared and optical (3,500 - 13,500 Angstroms) wavelengths. They have no read noise or dark current and perfect cosmic ray rejection, and are ideally suited to measuring rapidly varying sources. The observations and analysis will be used to improve understanding of the link between radio and optical emission in pulsars, search for spectral changes as a function of phase in the faint known optical pulsars PSR B0656+14 and Geminga, and open a new temporal regime by searching for pulsations in isolated and binary millisecond pulsars.