The Simons Observatory: A Minimum-Cost Matching Algorithm for Pairing Measured Resonances with Designed Detectors

TL;DR

This paper presents a minimum-cost matching algorithm to accurately pair measured resonances with their designed detectors in the Simons Observatory's microwave multiplexing system, improving detector-resonator assignment accuracy.

Contribution

The study introduces a bipartite graph-based pairing method that efficiently matches measured resonators to designed detectors considering fabrication variations and frequency shifts.

Findings

Effective pairing of resonators achieved on first on-sky measurements.

Algorithm reduces mismatches caused by fabrication and cooldown variations.

Demonstrated rapid and accurate assignment process.

Abstract

The Simons Observatory (SO) is a ground-based cosmic microwave background experiment currently being deployed to Cerro Toco in the Atacama Desert of Chile. The initial deployment of SO, consisting of three 0.46m-diameter small-aperture telescopes and one 6m-primary large-aperture telescope, will field over 60,000 transition-edge sensors that will observe at frequencies between 30 GHz and 280 GHz. SO will read out its detectors using Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) microwave-frequency multiplexing $\mu$mux, a form of frequency division multiplexing where an RF-SQUID couples each TES bolometer to a superconducting resonator tuned to a unique frequency. Resonator frequencies are spaced roughly every 2 MHz between 4 and 6 GHz, allowing for multiplexing factors on the order of 1000. One challenge of $\mu$mux is matching each tracked resonator with its corresponding physical detector. Variations in resonator fabrication, and frequency shifts between cooldowns caused by trapped flux can cause the measured resonance frequencies to deviate significantly from their designed values. In this study, we introduce a method for pairing measured and designed resonators by constructing a bipartite graph based on the two resonator sets, and assigning edge weights based on measured resonator and detector properties such as resonance frequency, detector pointing, and assigned bias lines. Finding the minimum-cost matching for a given set of edge weights is a well-studied problem that can be solved very quickly, and this matching tells us the best assignment of measured resonators to designed detectors for our input parameters. We will present results based on the first on-sky measurements from SAT1, the first SO MF small-aperture telescope.