APS: Superconducting eyes on the sky
This morning’s session on superconducting devices and applications kicked off with two intriguing talks about how to use superconductors as cameras for ground-based and space-based telescopes.
The first one, by Matthew Bell of the University at Buffalo, talked about using niobium nitride nanowires to detect photons. The idea is pretty simple: when photons hit the wire, they heat it up—disrupting the superconducting material and creating a measurable resistance. The second talk by Shwetank Kumar of Caltech talked about using a slightly more complicated setup of thin-film niobium resinators that also use the heat from photons to alter superconductoring behavior.
Kumar says that these devices could lead to a new generation of very sensitive astronomical cameras, but both talks showed that the devil is in the details. In the case of the wires, the theory doesn’t agree well with the data collected by Bell and his collaborators. Kumar says that unexplained noise on his group's devices are an ongoing problem. Still, he says that they are already good enough for some ground-based telescopes.