A broadband millimeter-wave spectrometer Z-Spec: sensitivity and ULIRGs
Abstract
Z-Spec is a cryogenic, broadband, millimeter-wave grating spectrometer. It is capable of obtaining many spectral lines simultaneously because of its unprecedented broad bandwidth (185-305GHz). The bandpass covers the 1mm atmospheric transmission window with a resolving power of 250-400. Z-Spec uses 160 silicon nitride micromesh bolometers cooled down to less than 100mK for background-limited performance. The unique capability of Z-Spec to detect multiple lines simultaneously allows us to obtain information efficiently on the physical and chemical conditions of nearby Ultra-luminous Infrared Galaxies (ULIRGs) powered by starbursts or Active Galactic Nuclei. Here we report on new millimeter-wave broadband data for ULIRGs acquired with Z-Spec and the noise performance and achieved sensitivity in observations with the CSO. We found that during the observations the noise scales with the atmospheric opacity and can be explained well by our sensitivity model, considering the photon noise originating from the sky and the telescope, as well as the detector and electronics noise. The photon noise is found to dominate the total noise.
Additional Information
© 2008 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). We thank all the CSO staff for supporting us to perform the Z-Spec observations successfully. H. Inami thanks the graduate university of advanced study for supporting the travel cost for visiting Caltech and JPL to complete this work. L. Earle is supported by NASA GSRP fellowship (NGTS-50478). J. Aguirre is funded by a Jansky Fellowship from NRAO. J. Glenn acknowledges an NSF Career Grant in support of Z-Spec (AST-0239270) and an Innovation Award from the Research Corporation (RI0928). This work was supported in part by NASA SARA grants NAGS-11911 and NAGS-12788.Attached Files
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 95568
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20190517-132002351
- NASA Graduate Student Research Fellowship
- NGTS-50478
- National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)
- NSF
- AST-0239270
- Research Corporation
- RI0928
- NASA
- NAGS-11911
- NASA
- NAGS-12788
- Created
-
2019-05-20Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Series Name
- Proceedings of SPIE
- Series Volume or Issue Number
- 7020