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Heat Capacity of Absorbers for Transition-Edge Sensors Suitable for Space-Borne Far-IR/Submm Spectroscopy
- Source :
- IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity. 19:524-527
- Publication Year :
- 2009
- Publisher :
- Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2009.
-
Abstract
- Using a noise thermometry technique, we measured the temperature dependence of the heat capacity C(T) of suspended SixNy membranes for two different geometries from 30 mK to 300 mK. We determined a volumetric specific heat of the SixNy on the order of 10 aJ/(mum3K) at 0.1 K for both absorber geometries. This value for the specific heat is comparable to a typical metal and is more than a factor of 10 larger than typical glassy materials. This result affects the design of highly efficient optical absorbers for membrane-isolated transition-edge sensors (TESs) for the Background-Limited far-IR/Submillimeter Spectrograph (BLISS), a proposed grating spectrometer that could fly on the next generation of large, cryogenic space-borne telescopes. We show that it is possible to reduce the thermal mass of the absorber of TESs so the effective response time taue is less than 100 ms-a requirement for all the wavelength bands for BLISS.
Details
- ISSN :
- 15582515 and 10518223
- Volume :
- 19
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi...........c7968c05e99d22df325a39a826285db9