Heterodyne Receivers
The N3AR is a single-pixel, dual polarization, sideband separating heterodyne receiver operating in the extended W-band frequency range (67 – 116 GHz; i.e. wavelength range around 3 mm).
N3AR is installed in the Cassegrain cabin of the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment telescope (APEX), next to our A-MKIDS camera.
LASMA
The Large APEX sub-Millimetre Array is a 7-pixel heterodyne array receiver for APEX operating in the 870 μm atmospheric window. LAsMA is a MPIfR principal investigator (PI) instrument, developed – as with CHAMP+ and PI230 – for the APEX Nasmyth-B cabin.
NFLASH
The NFLASH receiver system is a state of the art heterodyne single pixel spectrometer installed in January 2020 at the APEX telescope in Chile. It has the capability to perform simultaneous dual polarization observations in three important frequency bands: 200-270 GHz, 385-510 GHz and 780-950 GHz.
Finished Projects and Developments
GREAT (and its family of receivers)
GREAT is a highly modular instrument platform for heterodyne receivers for high-resolution spectroscopy on board of SOFIA. The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy is a joint project of NASA and DLR.
The upGREAT channels are second generation receivers for the GREAT platform. The receivers are medium-sized arrays, operating closed-cycle coolers.
The 4GREAT channel is the latest addition to GREAT's receiver suite. It comprises four single-pixel receivers, co-aligned on sky, and operating at four different frequency bands.
CHAMP+ is a dual-color heterodyne array for spectroscopy in the 450 and 350 μm atmospheric windows which has been built in collaboration with SRON-G (providing the SIS-mixers) and JPL. The instrument was successfully commissioned on APEX in summer 2007.
Details coming soon
FLASH is a dual-frequency MPIfR principal investigator (PI) receiver, operating simultaneously - on orthogonal polarizations - in the 345GHz and the 460GHz atmospheric windows. Design and construction of the instrument was launched in late 2003; the receiver has been in continuous operation on APEX since June 2004.
In Summer 99 the division took responsibility (as subsystem manager) for the local oscillator development for HIFI ( Heterodyne Instrument for HERSCHEL – formerly FIRST). HERSCHEL is ESA’s 4th cornerstone in the current Horizon 2000 science program, currently scheduled for launch in August 2008. HIFI is developed by a worldwide consortium of 25 scientific institutes, with the technological challenge to built a space-borne instrument of unique performance.