Related papers: Auto-tuned thermal control on stratospheric balloo…
Supersonic radiation diffusion approximation is a useful way to study the radiation transportation. Considering the bent Marshak wave theory in 2-dimensions, and an invariable source temperature, we get the supersonic radiation diffusion…
Technological advances will allow the placement of many Terahertz detectors at the focal plane of a single telescope. For a telescope of a given diameter and wavelength of operation, there is a limit to the number of usable detectors…
Telescopes, designed with semi-conductor based photo sensors, have the potential to detect Cherenkov or fluorescence light emitted by cosmic-rays in the atmosphere. Such telescopes promise a high duty cycle and efficiency in remote harsh…
The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for Polarimetry (BLASTPol) is a suborbital mapping experiment designed to study the role magnetic fields play in star formation. BLASTPol has had two science flights from McMurdo…
BaR-SPOrt (Balloon-borne Radiometers for Sky Polarisation Observations) is an experiment to measure the linearly polarized emission of sky patches at 32 and 90 GHz with sub-degree angular resolution. It is equipped with high sensitivity…
We describe the cryogenic system being developed for Taurus: a super-pressure balloon-borne microwave polarimeter scheduled to fly in 2027. The Taurus cryogenic system consists of a 660L liquid helium cryostat which achieves a base…
Infrared observations of metastable 2$^3$S helium absorption with ground- and space-based spectroscopy are rapidly maturing, as this species is a unique probe of exoplanet atmospheres. Specifically, the transit depth in the triplet feature…
Spontaneous wavefunction collapse models, like the Continuous Spontaneous Localization, are designed to suppress macroscopic superpositions, while preserving microscopic quantum phenomena. An observable consequence of collapse models is…
The displacement fluctuations of mirrors in optomechanical devices, induced via thermal expansion by temperature fluctuations due either to thermodynamic fluctuations or to fluctuations in the photon absorption, can be made smaller than…
Context. The term sky temperature is used in the literature in different contexts which often leads to confusion. In this work, we study $T_\text{sky}$, the effective bolometric sky temperature at which a hemispherical black body would…
The emerging technology of large (~ 10,000 pixel) submillimeter-wave bolometer arrays presents a novel optical design problem---how can such arrays be fed by diffraction-limited telescope optics where the primary mirror is less than 100,000…
The coherent control of a two-level system is among the most essential challenges in modern quantum optics. Understanding its fundamental limitations is crucial, also for the realization of next generation quantum devices. The quantum…
Observations that require large physical instrument dimensions and/or a considerable amount of cryogens, as it is the case for high spatial resolution far infrared (FIR) astronomy, currently still face technological limits for their…
The Single Aperture Far-InfraRed (SAFIR) Observatory's science goals are driven by the fact that the earliest stages of almost all phenomena in the universe are shrouded in absorption by and emission from cool dust and gas that emits…
We have developed a calibration system based on a micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) mirror that is capable of delivering an optical beam over a wavelength range of 180 -- 2000 nm (0.62 -- 6.89 eV) in a sub-Kelvin environment. This…
PoGOLite is a hard X-ray polarimeter operating in the 25-100 keV energy band. The instrument design is optimised for the observation of compact astrophysical sources. Observations are conducted from a stabilised stratospheric balloon…
The Probe of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics Balloon with Radio mission (PBR) will point above Earth's limb to measure PeV energy cosmic rays, and record star images to monitor optical focusing in situ. PBR will point below Earth's…
Thermal emission caused by the thermal motion of the charged particles is commonly broadband, un-polarized, and incoherent, like a melting pot of electromagnetic waves, which makes it unsuitable for infrared applications in many cases…
We demonstrate millikelvin thermometry of laser cooled trapped ions with high-resolution imaging. This equilibrium approach is independent of the cooling dynamics and has lower systematic error than Doppler thermometry, with \pm5 mK…
We study the fundamental limits of detection for astrophysical observations in the far infrared. Understanding these fundamental limits is critical to the planning and analysis of experiments in this region. We specifically characterize the…