Abstract
Frequency-domain multiplexing (fMux) is an established technique for the readout of large arrays of transition-edge sensor (TES) bolometers. Each TES in a multiplexing module has a unique AC voltage bias that is selected by a resonant filter. This scheme enables the operation and readout of multiple bolometers on a single pair of wires, reducing thermal loading onto sub-Kelvin stages. The current receiver on the South Pole Telescope, SPT-3G, uses a 68x fMux system to operate its large-format camera of \(\sim \)16,000 TES bolometers. We present here the successful implementation and performance of the SPT-3G readout as measured on-sky. Characterization of the noise reveals a median pair-differenced 1/f knee frequency of 33 mHz, indicating that low-frequency noise in the readout will not limit SPT-3G’s measurements of sky power on large angular scales. Measurements also show that the median readout white noise level in each of the SPT-3G observing bands is below the expectation for photon noise, demonstrating that SPT-3G is operating in the photon-noise-dominated regime.
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Acknowledgements
The South Pole Telescope program is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through Grant PLR-1248097. Partial support is also provided by the NSF Physics Frontier Center Grant PHY-1125897 to the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Kavli Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Grant GBMF#947 to the University of Chicago. Work at Argonne National Laboratory is supported by UChicago Argonne LLC, Operator of Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne). Argonne, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Laboratory, is operated under contract no. DE-AC02-06CH11357. We acknowledge R. Divan, L. Stan, C.S. Miller, and V. Kutepova for supporting our work in the Argonne Center for Nanoscale Materials. Work at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a DOE-OS, HEP User Facility managed by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC, was supported under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359. NWH acknowledges support from NSF CAREER Grant AST-0956135. The McGill authors acknowledge funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and the Fonds de recherche du Québec Nature et technologies. JV acknowledges support from the Sloan Foundation.
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Bender, A.N., Anderson, A.J., Avva, J.S. et al. On-Sky Performance of the SPT-3G Frequency-Domain Multiplexed Readout. J Low Temp Phys 199, 182–191 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10909-019-02280-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10909-019-02280-w