Cold-electron bolometers for future mm and sub-mm sky surveys

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development and testing of Cold-Electron Bolometers (CEBs) as highly sensitive, cosmic-ray-insensitive detectors suitable for future millimeter and sub-millimeter sky surveys, with promising experimental results.

Contribution

It introduces a new experimental setup to evaluate the optical performance and cosmic-ray insensitivity of CEBs for integration into future sky survey missions.

Findings

CEBs meet the sensitivity requirements for future sky surveys.

The experimental setup successfully tests CRs insensitivity.

CEBs show promising optical performance in laboratory tests.

Abstract

Future sky surveys in the mm/sub-mm range, like the forthcoming balloon-borne missions LSPE, OLIMPO, SPIDER etc., will need detectors insensitive to cosmic rays (CRs) and with a NEP of the order of $10^{-17} \div 10^{-18}\,$W/sqrt(Hz). The Cold-Electron Bolometers (CEBs) technology is promising, having the required properties, since the absorber volume is extremely small and the electron system of the absorber is thermally insulated from the phonon system. We have developed an experimental setup to test the optical performance and the CRs insensitivity of CEBs, with the target of integrating them in the OLIMPO and LSPE focal planes.