Radiation Total Dose for PRIMA: Cold Exposure with Alpha Particles
Elijah Kane, Chris Albert, Andrew Beyer, Charles (Matt) Bradford, Pierre Echternach, Logan Foote, Jason Glenn, Henry (Rick) LeDuc, Hien Nguyen, Thomas Stevenson, Brian Zhu, Jonas Zmuidzinas

TL;DR
This study assesses the impact of alpha particle radiation on KID arrays for the PRIMA space observatory, simulating space radiation effects at cryogenic temperatures to inform detector durability.
Contribution
Developed a cryogenic irradiation setup to simulate space radiation damage on KID arrays, and measured their properties before and after irradiation.
Findings
Irradiated detectors to 62% of expected 5-year L2 dose.
Measured changes in quasiparticle lifetime, resonant frequency, and quality factor.
Provided data to evaluate detector resilience in space radiation environment.
Abstract
The Probe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics (PRIMA) is a far-infrared (24-261 micron wavelengths) probe-class space observatory currently under Phase A study, which promises orders-of-magnitude improvement in mapping speed over its predecessors. PRIMA will field exquisitely sensitive kilopixel arrays of kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs) for the Far-Infrared Enhanced Survey Spectrometer (FIRESS) instrument. PRIMA will orbit in space at the Sun-Earth L2 point, where Planck found the energetic particle flux to be about 300/min/cm2. Thus, the possible effect of a high fluence of energetic particles on the detector sensitivity must be characterized. Previous work has suggested that bombardment of KIDs by ions can reduce the quasiparticle lifetime (Barends et. al. 2009), but the conditions of the experiment were not representative of a detector which is continuously held at sub-Kelvin…
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