NEW-MUSIC: The Next-generation Extended-Wavelength MUltiband Sub/millimeter Inductance Camera

The Next-generation Extended Wavelength-MUltiband Sub/millimeter Inductance Camera (NEW-MUSIC) on the Leighton Chajnantor Telescope (LCT) will be a first-of-its-kind, six-band, transmillimeter-wave ("trans-mm") polarimeter covering 2.4 octaves of spectral bandwidth to open a new window on the trans-mm time-domain frontier, in particular new frontiers in energy, density, time, and magnetic field. NEW-MUSIC's broad spectral coverage will also enable the use of the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effects to study accretion, feedback, and dust content in the hot gaseous haloes of galaxies and galaxy clusters. Six-band spectral energy distributions, with polarization information, will yield new insights into stellar and planetary nurseries. NEW-MUSIC will employ hierarchical, phased arrays of polarization-sensitive superconducting slot-dipole antennas, coupled to photolithographic bandpass filters, to nearly optimally populate LCT's 14′ field-of-view with six spectral bands over 80–420 GHz (1:5.25 spectral dynamic range; 2.4 octaves). Light will be routed to Al or AlMn microstripline-coupled, parallel-plate capacitor, lumped-element kinetic inductance detectors (MS-PPC-LEKIDs), an entirely new KID architecture that substantially enhances design flexibility while providing background-limited performance. Innovative, wide-bandwidth, etched silicon structures will be used to antireflection-treat the back-illuminated focal plane. NEW-MUSIC will cost-effectively reuse much of the MUSIC instrument, initially deploying a quarter-scale focal plane capable of the bulk of NEW-MUSIC science followed later by a full-FoV focal plane needed for NEW-MUSIC wide-area survey science.

This work has been supported by the JPL Research and Technology Development Fund, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under awards 80NSSC18K0385 and 80NSSC22K1556, the Department of Energy Office of High-Energy Physics Advanced Detector Research program under award DE-SC0018126, and the Wilf Foundation. The research was carried out in part at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). The authors acknowledge the work of numerous former students and collaborators in the development of the technologies presented here and thank Liam Connor, Anna Ho, Mansi Kasliwal, Shri Kulkarni, Sterl Phinney, and Vikram Ravi for development of the time-domain astronomy science targets.