Kinetic Inductance Detectors for Optical/NIR astronomy

Abstract: Kinetic Inductance Detectors are a superconducting detector technology that is capable of detecting single photons in the optical/IR range, with each photon being time-tagged to a microsecond. In addition, it is possible to simultaneously measure the energy (or wavelength) of the photon. They can be made into large arrays and promise to revolutionize many areas of astronomy. I will describe the background and current state of the art in the field, as well as some of the potential future applications for astronomy. This includes KIDSpec, a medium spectral resolution, echelle spectrograph that we are currently prototyping in the lab.