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).
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.