Jonas Zmuidzinas

I am an experimentalist working at the intersection of astronomy, engineering, and physics. I like to find astronomical problems that demand technical innovation for their solution, problems that cannot be solved using existing techniques or instruments. I am excited about new possibilities for discovery enabled by advances in technology and instrumentation. My work has focused primarily on the submillimeter/far-infrared wavelength band, which offers plenty of technical challenges. Our group has worked on a wide variety of projects, including ground-based instrumentation for the Caltech Submm Observatory (CSO), airborne instrumentation for the NASA's Kuiper Airborne Observatory and SOFIA, and the HIFI instrument on the ESA/NASA Herschel Space Observatory.

A central focus of our work is the invention and development of superconducting detectors and devices. Since 1999, our group has pioneered superconducting kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs or MKIDs) based on a frequency-multiplexed microwave/digital readout. This technology allows large arrays of very sensitive detectors to be produced, and has applications that span a broad range of topics in cosmology and astrophysics. Our group is currently developing KID arrays for the Terahertz Intensity Mapper (TIM), a NASA balloon payload, and advancing KID technology for PRIMA, a potential NASA next-generation far-infrared observatory.

The work is highly interdisciplinary, so our students come from a wide variety of backgrounds: astronomy, physics, applied physics, and electrical engineering. Some students focus primarily on astronomical projects, others lean more heavily toward instrumentation. Similarly, some graduates stay in astronomy; others migrate to other fields. Research projects can range from one-person efforts to large instrument teams with multiple collaborating institutions.