Image of a single microwave SQUID multiplexer chip, which measure 4 millimeters by 20 millimeters and contains 65 SQUID readout channels.
Credit: PML Quantum Sensors Division/NIST
Perched atop a high plateau in Chile’s Atacama Desert, a long-awaited observatory is beginning to take shape: the largest suite of ground-based telescopes devoted to studying the oldest light in the universe. radiation left over from the Big Bang.
Astronomers have for decades studied this primeval radiation, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which bathes the universe and provides a snapshot of what the 14-billion-year-old cosmos looked like in its infancy, just 380,0000 years after its violent birth. That’s when the universe became cool enough for electrons and atomic nuclei to coalesce into atoms, allowing light to stream freely into space for the first time.
The group of telescopes in Chile, collectively known as the Simons Observatory, offers a key advantage over other similar instruments: It features a new generation of exquisitely sensitive microwave detectors and a sophisticated read-out system, both built by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
The NIST-designed detectors, known as transition-edge-sensor bolometers, are heat sensors consisting of thin films of material chilled to one-tenth of a degree above absolute zero. Acting like miniature thermometers, the bolometers can discern miniscule temperature variations in the CMB over more than 40 percent of the sky, noted NIST scientist Johannes Hubmayr.
These tiny hot and cold spots in the radiation, which correspond to slight over- and underdensities in the early universe, represent the seeds from which galaxies formed. (The bolometers also record patterns of different polarizations in the CMB—wiggles in the ..
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