2022/08/03 by Cyndia Yu, Zeeshan Ahmed, Yu, Cyndia +9 · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det) #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Particle accelerators and beam dynamics #Superconducting Materials and Applications #Superconducting and THz Device Technology
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2208.02198
openalex publication_date 2022/08/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
We present the details of a simulation suite for modeling the effects of readout with SLAC Microresonator RF (SMuRF) electronics. The SMuRF electronics are a warm readout and control system for use with superconducting microwave resonator-based detector systems. The system has been used with the BICEP/Keck program and will be used on the upcoming Simons Observatory and BICEP Array experiments. This simulation suite is a software implementation of the main SMuRF algorithms for offline analysis, modeling, and study. The firmware-implemented algorithms for calibration, resonator frequency estimation, and tone tracking present sources of potential bias or errors if not modeled properly. The simulator takes as input true detector signal, realistic resonator properties, and SMuRF-related user-controlled readout settings. It returns the final flux ramp-demodulated output of a detector timestream as would be passed to the experiment data acquisition system, enabling the analysis of the impact of readout-related parameters on the final science data. It is publicly available in Python with accompanying Jupyter notebooks for user tutorials.