Superconducting Bolometers for Submillimeter Spectroscopy from Ground-Based, Airborne, and Space Platforms

The far-infrared and submillimeter regimes harbor significant numbers of strong lines useful as diagnostics of processes in the interstellar medium, regions of intense star formation, and AGN activity. Covering a decade or more in wavelength, many of them are emitted or redshifted to wavelengths where they are obscured by atmospheric absorption, and so airborne and spacebased instruments must be used. Capable, sensitive detector arrays are needed for this; we have been developing such arrays based on multiplexed superconducting bolometers. At the present level of maturity, we have fielded a submillimeter spectrometer containing around ten detectors of the requisite sensitivity. In the coming months, new instruments will demonstrate up to of order 100 bolometers (e.g., 8 × 16). We are working to implement over a thousand pixels in a single detector package. One application for such large arrays is the 100μm−655μm spectrometer SAFIRE on SOFIA. Future directions will be for space-based observatories such as SAFIR.