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Bourses ERC : projet lauréat à l’Observatoire de Paris

29 mars 2019

On March 28, 2019, the European Research Council (ERC) will award one of its 222 grants to a researcher from the Paris Observatory to carry out innovative projects, opening new avenues in their discipline or in other fields.

ERC Advanced Grants ERC Advanced Grants fund exploratory, high-risk, 5-year research projects with a maximum budget of 2.5 million euros each.

Led by Piercarlo Bonifacio, CNRS Research Director at the Galaxies, Stars, Physics, Instrumentation - GEPI department of the Paris Observatory, SPIAKID is one of the winning projects this year.

SPIAKID, winning project

This project aims to develop a new generation of Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KIDs) that will be able to detect photons in both the visible and infrared range (0.45 μm - 1.6 μm).

Prototype d’un capteur KID fabriqué en salle blanche à l’Observatoire de Paris.
La matrice de 10x10 pixels au centre de son bloc de montage. La taille des pixels est de 112 μm x 85 μm. Des tests à une température de 300 mK ont été effectués pour caractériser ce prototype.
© Observatoire de Paris / GEPI

The objective is to design a new type of spectro-imager, in the form of a demonstrator and deploy it on a very large telescope - the ESO VLT in Chile and/or the GTC in the Canary Islands.

The instrument will not only be able to count the photons detected, but also to sort them according to their energy. Like a "cube", the data obtained will have two spatial and one spectral dimension.

With an ultra-fast readout time (of the order of 10 μs), the new sensors will make it possible to "freeze" the turbulent movements of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Using sophisticated image reconstruction techniques, the instrument will gain high angular resolution for imaging celestial objects, theoretically up to the diffraction limits of the telescope to which it will be attached.

The KIDs sensors will be developed and manufactured at GEPI, Paris Observatory.

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