Development of Millimeter-Wave Instruments for Water Vapor Radiometry and Exploring the Regulation of Galaxy Evolution with High-Redshift ALMA Observations

The millimeter wavelength regime sits in between the radio and infrared (IR) on the electromagnetic spectrum. The earth's atmosphere largely absorbs radiation in the IR, and is transparent in radio. Meanwhile, at millimeter wavelengths the atmosphere has both strong absorption features and distinct transparent windows. This makes the development of millimeter-wave (mm-wave) instruments relevant to both astronomy and atmospheric sensing. In this thesis, I will present on the development of a novel weather sensor, and utilizing a mm-wave telescope array to investigate galaxy evolution. CubeSounder is a technology maturation project that develops a novel low size, weight, power and cost (SWaP-C) weather sensor. CubeSounder is direct detector mm-wave spectrometer that measures water vapor content of the atmosphere by observing the 183 GHz molecular water line and 60 GHz molecular Oxygen line. It utilizes custom resonant cavity waveguide filter banks, low noise amplifiers and diode detectors. CubeSounder improves upon the state of the art for weather sensors by providing similar levels of sensitivity with a 10x improvement to SWaP-C. Also, I present continuum observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) of 10 high-redshift ($2.2 \le z \le 2.7$) ultraluminous quasars (QSOs) and constrain the presence of hot, ionized, circum-galactic gas in a stacking analysis. I compare our stacked observations to active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback wind models, and generalized Navarro-Frenk-White (gNFW) pressure profile models to constrain the wind luminosity and halo mass of the stacked QSOs.