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Astro Seminar

MKIDs: The ultimate detector for optical/IR astronomy?

Speaker: Kieran O'Brien (Durham)
Date: Wednesday 4 May 2022
Time: 14:00
Venue: Zoom

MKIDs are a superconducting detector technology that is capable of detecting single photons in the optical/IR range, with each photon being time-tagged to a microsecond. In addition, it is possible to simultaneously measure the energy (or wavelength) of the photon. In this presentation, I will describe the background and current state of the art in the field, as well as some of the potential future applications for astronomy. This includes KIDSpec, a medium spectral resolution, echelle spectrograph that we are currently prototyping in the lab.