Monday Colloquium: Ben Mazin (UC Santa Barbara) "Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors for Astrophysics, Biophysics, and Dark Matter Detection"

Optical and near-IR Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors, or MKIDs, are superconducting detectors that can tell you the energy and arrival time of each individual photon without false counts. In this talk I will discuss the recent progress my group has made improving MKID and fielding them at some of the largest telescopes in the world. I will also discuss our efforts to broaden the scientific relevance of these detectors to other fields, including biological microscopy and dark matter detection.