Cooper Pair Box Charge Amplifier – COCA

Large efforts have been made in the past decades to develop new types of cryogenic sensors for various applications, ranging from material analysis for the industry to astroparticles detection. Future spatial programs involve detectors working around 50 mK, while their readout electronics (eg preamplifiers), still working at much higher temperature, frequently prevent extracting the best performance from these detectors.
In this wide and competitive context, mesoscopic devices provide attractive solutions for these problems. In this project, we propose to implement a mesoscopic charge amplifier for the readout of ionisation detectors, used for particles detection in many domains. Importantly, our device could improve by an order of magnitude the detection threshold of the EDELWEISS experiment for dark matter search, to which the CSNSM participates.
The course of this research will go through developments, both fundamental and instrumental, based on the mesoscopic physics of quantum superconducting circuits.
The aim of the present application is to provide with the funds necessary to initiate this new activity, consecutive to the hiring of the project's principal investigator at the CNRS (CSNSM). This project takes place within a broader framework aimed at developing a front-end mesoscopic cryoelectronics, to catch up with the latest developments in cryogenic detectors.