Lab Equipment

Mazin Lab contains state-of-the-art facilities for the development and testing of low temperature detectors and astronomical instruments built using low temperature detectors. The centerpiece of the lab are three refrigerators for cooling devices and a microwave readout system for characterizing detectors.

AJA UHV Superconducting Deposition System

This system, owned and controlled by our lab, is an incredibly powerful tool for making high quality films such as PtSi and Nb that are the basic building blocks of MKIDs.

Leiden Cryogenics Dilution Refrigerator

Our Leiden fridge arrived in February 2010. This large 450 microwatt fridge, with a base temperature of 12 mK, uses a Cryomech PT-415 pulse tube refrigerator to eliminate the need for liquid cryogens. The fridge contains two 2” clear shot tubes that accommodate special probes which allow us to insert an experiment into a running dilution fridge. This amazing development cuts the time required to cool a device from around three days to three hours!

Blue Fors Horizontal Dilution Refrigerator

This unique cryogen free dilution fridge (shown to the right) naturally supports instruments at a Nasmyth or Cassegrain focus. It can be tilted up to 50 degrees, and has a 270 mm clear aperture going to the 7.5 mK low temperature stage. This fridge is equipped with optical windows and cryogenic wiring to read out up to 10 feedlines.

Blue Fors LD-250 Dilution Refrigerator

This cryogen free dilution fridge is equipped with optical windows and cryogenic wiring to read out up to 5 feedlines as part of a MKID order sorting spectrometer testbed.

Janis Research Adiabatic Demagnetization Refrigerator (ADR)

We have an cryogen-free ADR from Janis Research is the dewar for ARCONS, the first UVOIR MKID instrument. This system allows us to cool devices below 100 mK with a hold time of at least 24 hours. It contains optical ports to allow direct illumination of the detector.

Microwave Readouts

Our analog microwave readout has the ability to do extremely rapid IQ sweeps of two resonators simultaneously using two Anritsu frequency synthesizers which can tune to a new frequency in less than 100 microseconds, Marki Microwave IQ mixers, and a National Instruments 4 channel 16-bit 1 MS/s digitizer. Our digital readout for ARCONS, based on 8 CASPER ROACH boards, is capable of reading out 2048 pixels over 4 GHz of bandwidth. Our new second generation readout, using ROACH2 and custom 2 GSPS 12-bit ADCs, can read out 10 kpix in an 11U rack mount form factor

Other notable equipment includes:

• Agilent 20 GHz Network Analyzer

• Keysight Fieldfox 12 GHz Network Analyzer w/TDR

• Agilent 20 GHz Spectrum Analyzer

• Agilent 500 MHz 4-channel Oscilloscope

• Weinreb HEMT amplifiers, 4-12 GHz @ 5 Kelvin noise temperature

•Low Noise Factory HEMT amplifiers, 4-8 GHz @ 2 Kelvin noise temperature

• Varian turbomolecular pumping station

• Leybold helium leak detector

• Quantum efficiency testbed with monochromater, integrating sphere, and calibrated photosensors

• Westbond wire bonding system

• Nikon microscopes