The Microwave Enhanced Bolometer

The microwave enhanced bolometer is a proposed cryogenic detector with an amplification mechanism. It consists of a crystal covered with a superconducting film exposed to a microwave flux. Incident particles will create nonthermal phonons in the crystal which then produce excess quasiparticles in the film. Those quasiparticles lead to microwave absorption in the film and a subsequent heating of the entire bolometer. In this way the energy deposited by a particle in the crystal could be amplified linearly by gains of up to 104. This would make possible bolometers of several kilograms with an excellent energy resolution which could be used for dark matter search or double beta decay experiments.