The development of wide-area cryogenic light detectors with baseline energy resolution lower than 20 eV RMS is essential for next generation bolometric experiments searching for rare interactions. Indeed the simultaneous readout of the light and heat signals will enable background suppression through particle identification. Because of their excellent intrinsic energy resolution, as well as their well-established reproducibility, kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs) are good candidates for the development of next generation light detectors. The CALDER project is investigating the potential of phonon-mediated KIDs. The first phase of the project allowed to reach a baseline resolution of 80 eV using a single KID made of aluminum on a 2 × 2 cm ² silicon substrate acting as photon absorber. In this paper we present a new prototype detector implementing a trilayer aluminum–titanium–aluminum KID. Taking advantage of superconducting proximity effect the baseline resolution improves down to 26 eV.

We propose a method to map the temperature distribution of the hot gas in galaxy clusters that uses resolved images of the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (tSZ) effect in combination with X-ray data. Application to images from the New IRAM KIDs Array (NIKA) andXMM-Newtonallows us to measure and determine the spatial distribution of the gas temperature in the merging cluster MACS J0717.5+3745, atz= 0.55. Despite the complexity of the target object, we find a good morphological agreement between the temperature maps derived from X-ray spectroscopy only – usingXMM-Newton(T_XMM) andChandra(T_CXO) – and the new gas-mass-weighted tSZ+X-ray imaging method (T_SZX). We correlate the temperatures from tSZ+X-ray imaging and those from X-ray spectroscopy alone and find thatT_SZXis higher thanT_XMMand lower thanT_CXOby ~ 10% in both cases. Our results are limited by uncertainties in the geometry of the cluster gas, contamination from kinetic SZ (~10%), and the absolute calibration of the tSZ map (7%). Investigation using a larger sample of clusters would help minimise these effects.

Developing wide-area cryogenic light detectors with baseline resolution better than 20 eV is one of the priorities of next generation bolometric experiments searching for rare interactions, as the simultaneous read-out of the light and heat signals enables background suppression through particle identification. Among the proposed technological approaches for the phonon sensor, the naturally multiplexed Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KIDs) stand out for their excellent intrinsic energy resolution and reproducibility. The potential of this technique was proved by the CALDER project that reached a baseline resolution of 154 ± 7 eV RMS by sampling a 2 × 2 cm² Silicon substrate with 4 Aluminum KIDs. In this paper, we present a prototype of Aluminum KID with improved geometry and quality factor. The design improvement, as well as the combined analysis of amplitude and phase signals, allowed to reach a baseline resolution of 82 ± 4 eV by sampling the same substrate with a single Aluminum KID.

In this work, we want to highlight the potential of lithium as a target for spin-dependent dark matter search in cryogenic experiments, with a special focu