Proceedings Article | 17 February 2003
KEYWORDS: Galactic astronomy, Sensors, Stars, Spectroscopy, Helium, Spectral resolution, Optical filters, Bolometers, Receivers, Mirrors
The redshift (Z) and of Early Universe Spectrometer (ZEUS) is a long slit echelle grating spectrometer that we are constructing for use in the submillimeter (350μm, 450μm, and 610μm) windows on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT). ZEUS has a resolving power of R≡λ/ΔΛ~1000, optimized for detecting broad, faint lines from extragalactic sources. The detector is a 16×32 pixel array of pop-up bolometers equipped with superconducting transition edge sensors linked into a SQUID multiplexed readout. This array should provide the requisite sensitivity at ~300mK, a temperature easily achieved using a two stage 3He refrigerator.
ZEUS is optimized to quickly obtain spectra of point sources over very broad bands in the submillimeter windows. In the 350μm window, ZEUS will provide an instantaneous 27 resolution element spectrum, for each of 16 spatial elements on the sky. The roughly 10% bandwidth 350μm window can therefore be covered with just four settings of the grating. Each pixel is mapped into 5" on the sky (roughly 1•λ/D at 350 μm), so that the field of view is 5"×80". At 610μm, the slit is opened to 12" (2.4 pixels) resulting in a resolving power of around 500. ZEUS can quickly change wavelength or telluric window, adapting well to the
demanding weather conditions in the short submillimeter windows.
To minimize the effects of stray background radiation, two cold cut-on filters are used, together with 300mK band pass filters mounted on a filter wheel. This filter train fully sorts the echelle grating order, blocking unwanted radiation, but with high submillimeter band transmission. The expected point source sensitivities for 370μm, 444μm, and 610μm are 2.7×1017 W m-2Hz-1/2, 1.2×10-17 W m-2Hz-1/2, and 1.6×10-17W m-2Hz-1/2, respectively.
Our primary scientific objectives are to (1) Investigate Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies (ULIGs) via their (CI) and mid-J CO line emission-what are the origins of their tremendous infrared (IR) luminosities? Why are some ULIGs weak in the 158 μm (CII) line? (2) Probe star formation in the early Universe using highly redshifted far-IR fine-structure line emission-especially that of the 158 μm (CII) line. How strong are starbursts in the early Universe? and (3) Provide redshifts for all 850 μm SCUBA sources, providing source distance, luminosity, and number counts as a function of z. What is the evolutionary history of starformation in the early Universe?
