HomeScience & TechTechnology Focus: Technology enables scientists to analyze the composition of exoplanets

Technology Focus: Technology enables scientists to analyze the composition of exoplanets

It may seem that technology is advancing year after year, as if by magic. But behind all the ongoing development and successful transformation there is a team of hardworking scientists and engineers. UC Santa Barbara Professor Ben Mazin develops advanced visual sensor telescopes and observatories. He and his team developed spectra correction for their superconducting sensor, a major step in their final goal: to analyze the structure of exoplanets.

“We have been able to almost double the power of spectral solutions in our field,” said first author Nicholas Zobrist, a medical student at Mazin Lab. “It opens a new path to scientific goals that we could not have achieved before.”Mazin Lab works with a type of sensor called MKID. Many light sources — such as the CMOS sensor on the phone camera — are silicon-based semiconductors. This works by the effect of an image: the photon strikes a sensor, emitting an electron that can be detected as a signal suitable for processing by a microprocessor.

MKID uses a superconductor, in which electricity can flow without resistance. In addition to zero resistance, these substances have other useful properties. For example, semiconductors have a gap strength that needs to be overcome to release an electron. The strength of the superconductor-related gap is about 10,000 times lower, so it can detect even weaker signals. In addition, a single photon can emit many electrons in a superconductor, unlike just one in a semiconductor. By measuring the number of cellular electrons, MKID can determine the intensity (or wavelength) of incoming light. “And the energy of the photon, or its spectra, tells us a lot about the physics of what produced that photon,” Mazin said.

Researchers had reached the limit of how sensitive they were to these MKIDs. Upon closer inspection, they discovered that the energy was leaking from the superconductor into the sapphire crystal plate of the device. As a result, the signal appears to be weaker than it actually is. But these have a tendency to interact with their environment, disintegrating and losing energy in what is known as resistance. In the superconductor, two electrons will pair — one thrown up and the other down — and this Cooper pair, as it is called, can move without resistance.

It’s like a couple in a club, “explains Mazin. Even though one person stops to talk to everyone along the way, slow down. “In the Superconductor, all the electrons are joined together.””A photon that strikes a nerve is like a person who comes in and spills a drink on one of his colleagues,” he continued. “This break up of the couple, caused one partner to stumble over the other couple and cause trouble.” This is the flow of cell electrons measured by MKID.But sometimes this happens at the edge of the dancefloor. The victim leaves the club without knocking on the door. Good for some dancers, but not for scientists. When this happens to MKID, the light signal will appear weaker than it actually was.

Mazin, Zobrist and co-authors found that a thin layer of metal indium — placed between the superconducting sensor and the substrate — significantly reduced sensory energy. Indium actually served as a fence around the dance floor, keeping dancers running around the room and communicating with the entire crowd. They chose indium because it is also a superconductor at temperatures where MKID will operate, and nearby superconductors tend to cooperate when thin. Iron has been a challenge for the team, though. Indium is softer than lead, so it has a tendency to accumulate. That is not good for making a thin, similar layer that other researchers need.

But their time and effort bore fruit. The system reduces the uncertainty of measuring wave length from 10% to 5%, the study reports. For example, photon wavelengths of 1,000 nanometers can now be measured with an accuracy of 50 nm with this system. “This has real implications for the science we can do,” says Mazin, “because we can better solve the spectra of the objects we are looking at.”

Different events produce photons with specific spectra (or wavelengths), and different molecules that absorb images of different wavelengths. Using this light, scientists can use spectroscopy to detect the formation of both objects near the visible world. Mazin is particularly interested in using these findings in exoplanet science. Currently, scientists can only perform spectroscopy of a small set of exoplanets. The planet needs to pass between its star and the Earth, and it must have a thick atmosphere so that enough light can pass through it for researchers to work with it. However, the signal level of noise is very low, especially on rocky planets, says Mazin.

With better MKID, scientists can use light from the planet’s surface, rather than just transmitting it into its tiny atmosphere. This will soon happen with the skills of the next generation of 30 meters telescopes. The Mazin team is also trying a completely different approach to the issue of energy loss. Although the results of the paper are impressive, Mazin said he believes the indium path may be outdated if his team succeeds in this new task. In any case, he added, scientists quickly shut down their intentions.

For more read: Nicholas Zobrist et al, Membraneless Phonon Trapping and Resolution Enhancement in Optical Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors, Physical Review Letters (2022). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.017701 

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