Andrew Ziegler, our grad student here at Penn State, has authored a paper on his groundbreaking research for the Project 8 neutrino mass experiment.
He developed an antenna called SYNCA that can mimic the cyclotron radiation emitted by a single electron in a magnetic trap (which we call CRES) – the type of signal that we want to acquire with the Project 8 detector! We have recently proved that CRES works at small scale, but now we need to scale it up to get more stats. The original plan was to build a large trap, and acquire the electron signals using large antenna arrays. The transmitter antenna would allow us to develop the receiver antenna array without building a full detector to trap electrons. Andrew built a small antenna array at Penn State to demonstrate the use of his SYNCA antenna, and the paper also reports on the first case of CRES acquired with antenna arrays and reconstructed via digital beamforming!
The paper is on arXiv and will be submitted to publication on JINST soon. You can read it here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08026.
