NWO-Veni-grant for Dr. Akira Endo of the Department of Quantum Nanoscience
24 augustus 2010 door M&C TNW/Department of QNOnly in English - Dr. Akira Endo has been awarded a 3 year NWO-Veni grant to bring superconducting nanotechnology towards astronomical observations. He works now as a post-doc in Teun Klapwijk’s group and will start his Veni-contract per 1-1-2011. The title of his proposal is: Probing the Cosmic History of Star Formation by Submillimeter Wave Ultrabroadband Spectroscopy using Superconducting Resonators.
Hidden
He explains: “Recent advances in submillimeter wave sensors have revealed the existence of an important population of very luminous but highly obscured galaxies in the early universe. These so-called submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) are so luminous that they could dominate cosmic star formation at those epochs. They are very faint in visible light because they are hidden in thick clouds of dust. This strongly hampers optical and near-infrared identifications and follow-up spectroscopy.
Redshifts
While current submillimeter cameras produce number counts of SMGs, they cannot determine their redshifts, which are necessary to convert number counts into a cosmic star formation history. Current spectroscopic redshifts of SMGs are based on a small subset of radio-detected SMGs with bright rest-frame optical emission lines. Ideally however, one would like to use the bright far-infrared and submillimeter emission lines of the neutral gas in these galaxies to determine redshifts for a larger unbiased sample.
Superconduction resonators
Here I propose as an experimental astronomer to make the breakthrough. I will use superconducting resonators as kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs) to sense atomic emission lines from submillimeter galaxies in the early universe of redshift 1-5 and higher. Arrays of a total of 10000 KIDs will serve as the sensitive detector of an ultrabroadband submillimeter grating spectrometer.”
