SCUBA-2: the 10 000 pixel bolometer camera on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope

By W. Holland, D. Bintley, E. Chapin, A. Chrysostomou, G. Davis, J. Dempsey, W. Duncan, M. Fich, P. Friberg, Mark Halpern and 39 more. 2013

488 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SCUBA-2 is an innovative 10000 pixel bolometer camera operating at submillimetre wavelengths on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT). The camera has the capability to carry out wide-field surveys to unprecedented depths, addressing key questions relating to the origins of galaxies, stars and planets. With two imaging arrays working simultaneously in the atmospheric windows at 450 and 850µm, the vast increase in pixel count means that SCUBA-2 maps the sky 100–150 times faster than the previous SCUBA instrument. In this paper we present an overview of the instrument, discuss the physical characteristics of the superconducting detector arrays, outline the observing modes and data acquisition, and present the early performance figures on the telescope. We also showcase the capabilities of the instrument via some early examples of the science SCUBA-2 has already undertaken. In February 2012, SCUBA-2 began a series of unique legacy surveys for the JCMT community. These surveys will take 2.5years and the results are already providing complementary data to the shorter wavelength, shallower, larger-area surveys from Herschel. The SCUBA-2 surveys will also provide a wealth of information for further study with new facilities such as ALMA, and future telescopes such as CCAT and SPICA.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e4879e1c1f5bfe7982d9dc6108fe0487a19fab86

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Citations in the corpus

Characterization of Scuba-2 450 μm and 850 μm selected galaxies in the COSMOS field (2013, background): “The new Submillimeter Common User Bolometric Array-2 (Scuba-2 Holland et al. 2013) instrument on JCMT presents exciting new avenues to explore infrared-bright starbursts in the early Universe.”
The NIKA2 large-field-of-view millimetre continuum camera for the 30 m IRAM telescope (2017, methodology): “Among them, we cite for example Artemis (Reveret et al. 2014) and LABOCA (Siringo et al. 2009) on APEX (Chile), SCUBA2 (Holland et al. 2013) on JCMT (Hawaii), AzTEC (Chavez-Dagostino et al. 2016) on the LMT (Mexico), MUSTANG2 (Dicker et al. 2014) on GBT (USA), HAWC+ (Staguhn et al. 2016) on-board SO”
THE SCUBA-2 COSMOLOGY LEGACY SURVEY: ALMA RESOLVES THE REST-FRAME FAR-INFRARED EMISSION OF SUB-MILLIMETER GALAXIES (2014, methodology): “These SMGs have a range of 870µm flux density of 1– 14 mJy and we recover the single–dish SCUBA-2 with a median ratio of SSCUBA2 /SALMA = 1.04±0.05.”
Scuba-2: Iterative map-making with the sub-millimetre user reduction facility (2013, methodology): “The white noise levels of SCUBA-2 bolometers are measured between 2 and 10 Hz in the PSDs (as described in Section 3.2.5), leading to noise equivalent powers (NEPs, with units W s1/2) – the rms time-series noise in a 1 s integration (see section 3.5.2 in Holland et al. 2013).”
Widely Tunable On-Chip Microwave Circulator for Superconducting Quantum Circuits (2017, background): “Examples include rapid single flux quantum logic [27]; microwave kinetic inductance detectors [28], transition edge sensors [29] and other astronomical detector arrays; dark-matter searches [30]; and tests of Lorentz invariance with high-quality microwave resonators [31].”
Dusty Star Forming Galaxies at High Redshift (2014, background): “Scubawas decommissioned in 2005 to make way for the second generation instrument for the JCMT, Scuba-2.”
PICO: Probe of Inflation and Cosmic Origins (2019, unknown): “SCUBA2 on JCMT has 10,000 pixels, nearly as many detectors as planned for PICO [306].”
ALMA SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY IN THE HUBBLE ULTRA DEEP FIELD: THE INFRARED EXCESS OF UV-SELECTED z = 2–10 GALAXIES AS A FUNCTION OF UV-CONTINUUM SLOPE AND STELLAR MASS (2016, methodology): “Again we break up our samples into two different red- 28 Given the broad SCUBA-2 beam, it is possible that the farIR stacks Coppin et al. (2015) create of the bluer sources include some flux from their bright neighbors.”
Scuba-2: On-sky calibration using submillimetre standard sources (2013, methodology): “All calibrators were observed using a daisy scan-pattern (Holland et al. 2013), designed specifically for observation of point and compact sources, with observations lasting approximately four minutes each.”