Argonne leverages its suite of multidisciplinary facilities and equipment to develop new cutting-edge superconducting detectors, beginning with custom materials, to eventually produce fully characterized devices ready for delivery to CMB telescopes at the forefront of the field.

Materials synthesis and characterization

Argonne’s Materials Sciences division (MSD) leverages materials synthesis and characterization capabilities to develop new materials designed with functional properties, tailored to specific requirements for CMB research.

Center for Nanoscale Materials

The Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facility located at Argonne, can then be used to fabricate materials into detectors and devices. CNM’s 17,000-square-foot class 100 and 1,000 cleanroom is a nanofabrication facility with comprehensive lithographic, deposition, etching and metrology suites for wafer-scale processing of complex systems and devices. Researchers use the CNM to fabricate materials developed by MSD into operational CMB detectors.

Custom characterization

These detectors are subsequently characterized in Argonne’s High Energy Physics division using a number of sub-Kelvin test stands equipped with custom readout electronics.