CONCERTO at APEX: Installation and first phase of on-sky commissioning

Philip Daniel Mauskopf ,T Fenouillet,Chris Groppi ,Jean‐Charles Lambert ,J Marpaud,C Tucker,M Aravena,N Ponthieu,A Benoı̂t ,J E Garcia ,A Fasano,Louis Prieur ,J P Leggeri ,G Raffin,G Garde,S Roudier,G Pisano,J F Macías-Pérez ,A Beelen,L Eraud,Peter A R Ade ,A Monfardini,L Vivargent,G Lagache,F Lévy-Bertrand ,J Bounmy,Wenkai Hu ,S Roni,Guillaume A Brès ,A Catalano,O Bourrion,M Marton,M Calvo,Hamdi Mani ,D Tourrès ,M Béthermin,J Goupy,E Barria,F.-X Désert,C Durán ,Christophe Hoarau ,C De Breuck,G Duvauchelle

doi:10.1051/epjconf/202225700010

Abstract

CONCERTO (CarbON CII line in post-rEionisation and ReionisaTiOn) is a large field-of-view (FoV) spectro-imager that has been installed on the Cassegrain Cabin of Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) telescope in April 2021. CONCERTO hosts 2 focal planes and a total number of 4000 Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KID), with an instantaneous FoV of 18.6 arcminutes in the range of 130-310 GHz. The spectral resolution can be easily tuned down to 1 GHz depending on the scientific target. The scientific program of CONCERTO has many objectives, with two main programs focused on mapping the fluctuations of the [CII] line intensity in the reionisation and postreionisation epoch (4.5<z<8.5), and on studying galaxy clusters via the thermal and kinetic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (SZ) effect. CONCERTO will also measure the dust and molecular gas contents of local and intermediate-redshift galaxies, it will study the Galactic star-forming clouds and finally it will observe the CO intensity fluctuations arising from 0.3<z<2 galaxies. The design of the instrument, installation at APEX and current status of the commissioning phase and science verification will be presented. Also we describe the deployment and first on-sky tests performed between April and June 2021.

Highlights

Starting from January 2019, the Grenoble collaboration (LPSC1, Institut Néel and IPAG 2) together with the LAM3, funded by an Advanced Grant European Research Council (ERC) has worked to design, fabricate, install, commission, and observe with the CONCERTO [1] instrument
CONCERTO is installed at the 12-metre Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) telescope and it is open to the APEX community, the scientific goals will be manifold
The second half of the beam is first de-focused from a focused image to a pupil and collected to the detectors

Summary

Introduction

Starting from January 2019, the Grenoble collaboration (LPSC1, Institut Néel and IPAG 2) together with the LAM3, funded by an Advanced Grant ERC has worked to design, fabricate, install, commission, and observe with the CONCERTO [1] instrument. CONCERTO is installed at the 12-metre APEX telescope and it is open to the APEX community, the scientific goals will be manifold. The atomic [CII] line is one of the most valuable tracers of star formation. At high redshifts it is observed in the sub-millimetre and millimetre atmospheric windows [2, 3]. We will use the [CII] line emission as a tracer of cosmic density structure, and make the first constraints on the power spectrum of dusty star-forming matter. We will present a description of the instrument, its installation at the telescope and some technical and scientific commissioning results

The CONCERTO Instrument

Findings

Installation and first phase of on-sky commissioning