DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

Capacity Building for Thai Astronomy Phase 3: Establishing NARIT Millimetre Laboratory for Developing State-of-the-Art Astronomical Receivers

Project disclaimer

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Description

JCMT is the largest existing single dish millimetre (mm) and sub-millimetre telescope in the world, originally built by UK, and stationed at the Mauna Kea peak of the Haiwai'i island. The telescope is currently owned and operated by the East Asia Observatory (EAO), in which NARIT is a member of the organisation. NARIT is also heavily involved in the EAO up-coming plan to upgrade the various receiver instruments hosted in JCMT, in particular the heterodyne array HARP-B, which is a 16-pixel superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) mixer receiver. The plan is to replace HARP-B with a cutting-edge compact high sensitivity instrument with even larger pixel count to expand the mapping area and increase the mapping speed by at least an order of magnitude. The new receiver needs to be housed within the existing restricted space in the receiver cabin of JCMT without the need for major re-engineering of the facility, and this could be done by employing the latest heterodyne receiver technologies. The success of this upgrading programme relies on the combination of various state-of-the-art technologies and support from numerous resources, which inevitably comes with significant human capacity and skills development challenges. Currently, Thailand has few astronomers or engineers who can design, construct and operate the instrument. But the pool of talented candidates whom can be trained and performed the job is large, due to the country's strong educational programme that equips the students with the required fundamental skills to uptake the challenging tasks. On the other hand, the scientific community in UK, particular the group in the University of Oxford and the University of Manchester, have many years of experience in developing technologies in the mm-wave and building instruments for various astronomical applications. Therefore, through this proposal, we aim to address these challenges by tapping into the UK's long heritage and highly developed skills in mm-wave astronomy and instrumentation, to train and prepare the personnel in NARIT with the fundamental skill-sets and technical know-how to contribute to the long-term programme of constructing mm-wave instruments for JCMT, and many other instruments, in the near future. The two main research topics proposed in this program that would allow us to use these as platform to provide training and knowledge transfers are 1) Constructing a prototype linear 1 x 4 SIS mixer array at 350 GHz that could be further extended and stacked to form a much larger array e.g., an 8 x 8, 64-pixel array, aiming to upgrade the existing HARP-B in JCMT; and 2) Development of Low Noise Amplifiers (LNAs) above 70 GHz and produce compact and highly integrated packaging scheme for Focal Plane Array (FPA) receivers. These LNAs would have applications on the new Thai National Radio Telescope (125 GHz receiver) and JCMT (200-350 GHz), both of which NARIT have access to. We will use these research targets as the vehicle for technology transfer via bilateral UK-Thailand collaboration. Both projects will also incorporate many key skills of value to a developing knowledge economy such as engineering, electronics, cryogenics and telecommunications technology etc. We will also partner with the Thai astronomical and technical community to further propagate the technical knowledge acquired from astronomy instrumentation to the wider audience, bolstering the Thai general population skill base e.g., via public talks and outreach programme. This programme will not only help to develop the skills that Thailand urgently needs at this stage, but will also have impact on the wider economy through the increased uptake of undergraduates and graduates in Science Technology Engineering and Medicine (STEM) area, and up-skilling of current graduates and postgraduates in various other advanced science and technological fields.

Objectives

The Newton Fund builds research and innovation partnerships with developing countries across the world to promote the economic development and social welfare of the partner countries.

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Location

The country, countries or regions that benefit from this Programme.

Thailand

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