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

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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.