APEC Seminar (Astronomy - Particle Physics - Experimental Physics - Cosmology)

Speaker: Akira Endo (TU Delft and the DESHIMA/TIFUUN collaboration)
Title: Integral Field Units for mm-submm Astronomy --- from DESHIMA to TIFUUN
Date (JST): Thu, Jul 21, 2022, 14:00 - 15:00
Place: Hybrid
Abstract: The next challenge in millimeter-submillimeter (mm-submm) astronomy is to generate 3D maps of statistically large cosmic volumes with complete spectral information, to uncover the history of cold matter back to the first billion years of the Universe, the evolution of hot matter in galaxy clusters, and the emergence of cosmic large-scale structure from those baryonic materials.

Vital for this endeavor is the integral field unit (IFU), which is a 2D array of spectrometers that instantaneously measures the spectrum of all points in the image. The IFU has reshaped astronomy at shorter visible wavelengths, but it is absent for mm-submm waves, because it falls out of reach of any existing technology.

I will present the development of DESHIMA (DEep Spectroscopic HIgh-redshift MApper), an ultra-wideband mm-submm spectrometer for the ASTE telescope in Chile. The innovation of DESHIMA is the integrated superconducting spectrometer (ISS), which hosts an on-chip filterbank backed with kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs). The ISS technology is scalable towards hundreds of spectral pixels (spaxels) on a single wafer, enabling the construction of a mm-submm 3D IFU. Indeed, the aim of our new project TIFUUN (THz Integral Field Unit with Universal Nanotechnology) is to construct a variety of such IFUs to open the field of volumic mm-submm astronomy.