Design of the SPT-SLIM focal plane: A spectroscopic imaging array for the South Pole Telescope

• Published in: Journal of Low Temperature Physics
• Main Authors: Barry, P. S., Anderson, A., Benson, B., Carlstrom, J. E., Cecil, T., Chang, C., Dobbs, M., Hollister, M., Karkare, K. S., Keating, G. K., Marrone, D., McMahon, J., Montgomery, J., Pan, Z., Robson, G., Rouble, M., Shirokoff, E., Smecher, G.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Springer 2022
• Subjects: Austral; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/154598/; https://doi.org/10.1007/s10909-022-02843-4; https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/154598/1/10909_2022_Article_2843.pdf

The Summertime Line Intensity Mapper (SLIM) is a mm-wave line-intensity mapping (mm-LIM) experiment for the South Pole Telescope (SPT). The goal of SPT-SLIM is to serve as a technical and scientific pathfinder for the demonstration of the suitability and in-field performance of multi-pixel superconducting filterbank spectrometers for future mm-LIM experiments. Scheduled to deploy in the 2023-24 austral summer, the SPT-SLIM focal plane will include 18 dual-polarisation pixels, each coupled to an R=λ/Δλ=300 thin-film microstrip filterbank spectrometer that spans the 2 mm atmospheric window (120–180 GHz). Each individual spectral channel feeds a microstrip-coupled lumped-element kinetic inductance detector, which provides the highly multiplexed readout for the 10k detectors needed for SPT-SLIM. Here, we present an overview of the preliminary design of key aspects of the SPT-SLIM focal plane array, a description of the detector architecture and predicted performance, and initial test results that will be used to inform the final design of the SPT-SLIM spectrometer array.