Pre-deployment Verification and Predicted Mapping Speed of MUSCAT

TL;DR

This paper presents the pre-deployment verification, simulated mapping speed, and design overview of MUSCAT, a 1.1 mm receiver with 1,500 detectors for the Large Millimeter Telescope, demonstrating effective sky fluctuation removal and upgrade potential.

Contribution

It introduces a simplified simulation method for predicting MUSCAT's mapping speed and discusses its design for future upgrades and technological testing.

Findings

Predicted mapping speed aligns with bolometric model after empirical scaling.

Sky fluctuation contamination can be mitigated using principal component analysis.

MUSCAT design supports future technological upgrades and testing.

Abstract

The Mexico-UK Submillimetre Camera for AsTronomy (MUSCAT) is a 1.1 mm receiver consisting of 1,500 lumped-element kinetic inductance detectors (LEKIDs) for the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT; Volc\'an Sierra Negra in Puebla, M\'exico). MUSCAT utilises the maximum field of view of the LMT's upgraded 50-metre primary mirror and is the first M\'exico-UK collaboration to deploy a millimetre/sub-mm receiver on the Large Millimeter Telescope. Using a simplistic simulator, we estimate a predicted mapping speed for MUSCAT by combining the measured performance of MUSCAT with the observed sky conditions at the LMT. We compare this to a previously calculated bolometric-model mapping speed and find that our mapping speed is in good agreement when this is scaled by a previously reported empirical factor. Through this simulation we show that signal contamination due to sky fluctuations can be effectively removed through the use of principle component analysis. We also give an overview of the instrument design and explain how this design allows for MUSCAT to be upgraded and act as an on-sky demonstration testbed for novel technologies after the facility-class TolTEC receiver comes online.