Conformal Phased Array for DISTURB

Mankind becomes ever more reliant on wireless technology like mobile communications, navigation and radar. This development has resulted in more sensitive receivers, but this increased sensitivity also has increased the susceptibility of these receivers to interference from external sources. One of these sources that is known to disrupt...

Dielectric Loss Measurements at Sub-K Temperatures and Terahertz Frequencies

On-chip spectrometers, such as DESHIMA and SuperSpec, require transmission lines with very low loss of tanδ < 10^-4 to achieve sufficient system efficiency. Transmission lines with higher loss would introduce too much signal attenuation in the line from antenna to filter and in the filters themselves. Data regarding the losses of...

Ultra High Kinetic Inductance Detectors

Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) are extremely sensitive radiation detectors based on superconducting resonators that can be combined in large arrays on a single readout line within a limited frequency bandwidth. This makes MKIDs ideal detectors for the ultimate far-infrared observatory: a future space-based actively cooled...

Towards measuring the microscopic origin of 1/f-flux noise using nanowire transmons subject to a magnetic field

Superconducting-normalconducting-superconducting (SNS) transmons with 2-facet Al-shell nanowires are qubits compatible with magnetic fields above 10 mT. There are important correlations of the room temperature nanowire resistance with the chance of the qubit being measurable: at a resistance of 2−3 kΩ, the qubit is almost guaranteed to work. The...

Exoplanet surface mapping

In this thesis we consider the reconstruction of albedo maps of exoplanets. This is done with a new variant of spin-orbit tomography that has been described in [Cowan and Agol, 2008] and more in depth in [Fujii and Kawahara, 2012]. This method reconstructs the albedo map from the reflected-light curve, the total intensity of the light that...

Fabrication and characteriation of Josephson parametric amplifiers

In this thesis, a we have designed and fabricated a Josephson Parametric Amplifier (JPA) using a new double-angle evaporation method without a Dolan bridge. We have found and resolved several issues in the fabrication procedure, but it requires further tuning before being fully functional. We have also simulated the behaviour of a general...

Interferer selection for binaural cue preservation in joint binaural linearly constrained minimum variance beamforming

Spatial cues allow a listener to determine the direction sound is coming from. In addition, recognising spatially separated sound sources facilitate the listener to focus on specific sound sources. Because of this, preservation of spatial cues in multi-microphone hearing assistive devices is important to the listening experience and safety of...

Quasi-optical system for the DESHIMA spectrometer

DESHIMA is a superconducting on-chip spectrometer using MKIDs in the sub-mm wavelength regime (240-720 GHz, 1:3 bandwidth). This thesis presents (1) an analysis of the quasi-optical system used for DESHIMA on the ASTE telescope in Chile (2) design of the room-temperature optics of this design and (3) a preliminary investigation into an ultra...