MKID

API reference: MKID

As reported in [1], a superconducting microwave kinetic-inductance detector (MKID) is a novel concept of photo-detector tailored for wavelengths below a few millimetres [4]. Essentially, it is an LC micro-resonator with a superconducting photo-sensitive area, which is capable of detecting single photons; as well as providing a measurement on their arrival time and energy. Operationally, each photon impinging on the MKID breaks a number of superconducting charge carriers, called Cooper pairs, into quasi-particles. In turn, thanks to the principle of kinetic inductance, which becomes relevant only below a superconducting critical temperature, such a strike is converted into a sequence of microwave pulses (at a few $GHz$) with a wavelength-dependent profile; which are then read out one by one, on a single channel. An important caveat is that the photo-generated pulse profiles can be distinguished only if they do not overlap in time and if the read-out bandwidth is large enough. The situation is analogous to the “pulse pile-up” and “coincidence losses” of EM-CCDs, in photon-counting mode [e.g., Wilkins et al., 2014]. In other words, there is a maximum limit to the achievable count rate, which is inversely proportional to the minimum distance in time between distinguishable pulse profiles: the so-called “dead time”, which is fundamentally determined by the recombination time of quasi-particles re-forming Cooper pairs. Given this, an MKID-array per se can serve as an intrinsic integral-field spectrograph, at low resolution, without any dispersive elements or chromatic filters [5].

Below all available models for MKID are listed.

Available models

• Scene generation

  • Create and Store a detector

  • Load star map

• Photon collection

  • Create and Store a detector

  • Simple collection

  • Load image

  • Simple illumination

  • Stripe pattern

  • Shot noise

  • Physical Optics Propagation in PYthon (POPPY)

  • Load PSF

• Charge generation

  • Create and Store a detector

  • Simple photoconversion

  • Conversion with custom QE map

  • Conversion with 3D QE map

  • Apply QE curve

  • Load charge

  • CosmiX cosmic ray model

  • Dark current

  • Simple dark current

• Phasing

  • Create and Store a detector

  • Pulse processing

• Charge collection

  • Create and Store a detector

  • Simple collection

  • Simple full well

  • Fixed pattern noise

• Charge measurement:

  • Create and Store a detector

  • DC offset

  • kTC reset noise

  • Simple charge measurement

  • Output node noise

  • Non-linearity (polynomial)

• Readout electronics:

  • Create and Store a detector

  • Simple ADC

  • Simple amplification

  • Dead time filter

  • Simple phase conversion

• Data processing:

  • Create and Store a detector

  • Statistics

  • Mean-variance

  • Linear regression

  • Extract ROI

  • Remove Cosmic Rays

  • Signal-to-noise ratio