Digitial Readout for Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors and Applications in High Time Resolution Astronomy

This dissertation spans two topics relating to optical tonear-infrared astronomical cameras built around Microwave KineticInductance Detectors (MKIDs). The first topic is the development of adigital readout system for 10- to 30-kilopixel arrays of MKIDs. MKIDs aresuperconducting detectors that can detect individual photons with a widerange of wavelengths with high time resolution (\SI{2}{\micro s}) and low energyresolution. The advantage of MKIDs over other low temperature detectors with similar capabilities is that it is relatively straightforward to multiplex MKIDs into largearrays. All the complexity of readout is in room temperature electronics.This work discusses the implementation and programming of theseelectronics.The second part of this work demonstrates the capabilities of the prototypeoptical and near-infrared MKID instrument with observations ofpulsars. Detecting optical pulsations in these objects require high timeresolution and low noise. The discovery of a correlation between thebrightness of optical pulses from the Crab pulsar and the time of arrivalof coincident giant radio pulses is presented. The search for opticalpulses from a millisecond pulsar J0337+1715 is discussed along with a newupper limit on the brightness of its optical pulses