Successful irradiation campaign on PRIMA/PRIMAger KIDs detectors with DRACuLA

TL;DR

This paper describes the development and successful use of the DRACuLA cryogenic platform for irradiating KID detectors at sub-Kelvin temperatures, demonstrating its operational performance during a proton irradiation campaign.

Contribution

It introduces the DRACuLA facility and reports on its deployment and performance during a proton irradiation campaign on KID arrays for the PRIMA mission.

Findings

DRACuLA maintained detector temperature at 120 mK during irradiation

The platform successfully integrated with the beam line at PARTREC

Operational performance met the requirements for irradiation testing

Abstract

DRACuLA (Detector irRAdiation Cryogenic faciLity for Astrophysics) is a mobile dilution refrigerator platform developed at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS) to expose sub-Kelvin detectors to particle beams at their nominal operating temperature, in the range 50-300 mK. We report on its design, beam-line integration at the Particle Therapy Research Center (PARTREC) in Groningen, and the operational performance achieved during the September 2025 irradiation campaign on Kinetic Inductance Detector (KID) arrays developed by SRON for the PRIMA mission. The detector samples were maintained at 120 mK throughout a 12-hour proton irradiation run at 184 MeV. The scientific results of this campaign are reported in the companion paper by Besnard et al.