SUMMERLAND KEY, Fla. — Physicists who have demonstrated the principles behind a new type of telescope detector are hopeful that their findings will spur NASA to invest more heavily in detector technology — something astrophysicists have said will be necessary if the agency is serious about building space telescopes that will unravel the mysterious split seconds after the Big Bang.

"In general, NASA’s planning for the detector technology is really not in very good shape," said experimental physicist Jonas Zmuidzinas of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who helped conceive the new detector approach.

The new technique uses changes in the vibration, or resonance, of superconducting materials to measure the intensity of space radiation. The technique could eliminate the need to attach tiny wires to each light sensitive chip, or detector, within the detector arrays of future space telescopes, he said.

Some of those missions could be decades from launch. "That’s a while off but we really ought to get started," said NASA astrophysicist John Mather, the project scientist for the Cosmic Background Explorer, which raised the possibility that larger and more sensitive detector arrays might be able to produce images of the early universe from cosmic microwave background radiation. Mather is now a member of the SAFIR team.

Over coffee one day, Zmuidzinas and superconducting-device expert Henry (Rick) LeDuc of the nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) began brainstorming a way around the wiring problem. They asked Peter Day, a low-temperature physics expert at JPL, and two Caltech students to join them in a series of laboratory tests at JPL.

The team reported some of its findings in a technical paper, "A broadband superconducting detector suitable for use in large arrays," that appeared in the Oct. 23 issue of the journal Nature.

Day, who was in charge of the experiment, chilled a small film of aluminum in a refrigerator so electricity would flow through it without resistance, called superconductivity. Electric current in super-conducting aluminum resonates with a particular frequency based on the size of the sample.

Scientists know that radiation from space breaks apart pairs of electrons within superconductors, which changes the resonance of the material. The Caltech-JPL team showed how a single cable could deliver numerous microwave frequencies across the detectors to in effect listen for the resonance changes in each detector. "It’s like cable TV. You have a cable that comes into your house with all the different channels you can watch," Zmuidzinas.

Only two cables, one for the input, and one for the output, would be needed for an array of 1,000 detectors, Day said.

"At this stage we’ve demonstrated the principles behind the detectors, but these are not detectors you could go put behind a telescope yet," Zmuidzinas cautioned. "What we need to do now is push the technology," he said.

Much of the work was funded by a grant from NASA’s Aerospace Technology research division. That grant expires in February 2004, and Zmuidzinas said he is hopeful NASA officials will renew it.

Mather said he and other astrophysicists are watching developments closely in the world of detector research. "There are lots of excellent ideas and things that are in the lab. What we don’t yet have are large scale detectors with thousands and thousands of pixels," he said.