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Journal of Applied Physics

Harmonic mixing at mm waveband in a high temperature superconducting grain boundary Josephson junction

Huabing Wang, Weiwei Xu, Qilin Cheng, Peiheng Wu, Yujie Luo, H. Ye, J. M. Zhang

Published Feb 15, 1994• 16 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Using a high Tc superconducting grain boundary Josephson junction, harmonic mixing experiments in the mm waveband were carried out, aiming at as large a harmonic number and as high a signal frequency as possible. The dependencies of intermediate frequency output on dc bias, harmonic number, frequency of local oscillator (LO), and other parameters were carefully studied. Until now, our best result was the mixing between the signal at 95 GHz and the 105th harmonic of LO at about 900 MHz. Preliminary experiments using a high Tc harmonic mixer and phase-locking loop were tried to stabilize the frequency of a mm wave source.

DOI
10.1063/1.356293

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Using a high Tc superconducting grain boundary Josephson junction, harmonic mixing experiments in the mm waveband were carried out, aiming at as large a harmonic number and as high a signal frequency as possible. The dependencies of intermediate frequency output on dc bias, harmonic number, frequency of local oscillator (LO), and other parameters were carefully studied. Until now, our best result was the mixing between the signal at 95 GHz and the 105th harmonic of LO at about 900 MHz. Preliminary experiments using a high Tc harmonic mixer and phase-locking loop were tried to stabilize the frequency of a mm wave source.
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1 Introduction Compared with its semiconductor counterpart, Josephson junction (J. J.) usually has larger nonlinearity, lower noise temperature, wider operating waveband and less microwave loss, thus making itself a good candidate for applications at submillimeter and far-infrared wavebands. Some harmonic mixing experiments were done previously using N_b point-contact junctions, with the highest signal frequency being about 4.25 THz and the largest harmonic number being 851. However, because of the requirement of liquid
A high-temperature superconducting (HTS) terahertz (THz) heterodyne mixer based on a thin-film antenna-coupled YBa2Cu3O7-xstep-edge Josephson junction is presented. The frequency down-conversion from 0.6 THz to an intermediate frequency (IF) of 2 GHz was achieved using high-order harmonic mixing of a local oscillator (LO), thus removing the need to use a second THz source as the LO pumping source. The DC and RF characteristics of the harmonic mixer as well as the relationship of the IF output power versus the harmonic number were experimentally studied and compared with simulated results. Most of our measurements were made at 40 K, but we also observed stable harmonic mixing at 77 K which we believe has not been reported previously in HTS junction mixers.
In a c-axis junction stack (10 μm×10 μm in a-b plane) patterned on a Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+X single crystal, we performed harmonic mixings between a 100 GHz signal and up to the 98th harmonic of a local oscillator at about 1 GHz. The dependence of PIF on V, where PIF is the mixing output at the intermediate frequency and V is the dc voltage across the junction stack, was strongly affected by the local oscillator power levels. For low values of local oscillator power, the optimum operation point where PIF became maximum was around zero bias, and typical multi-branch structure of PIF vs V curves were observed. For high values of local oscillator power, the optimum operation point moved to the high-voltage region. In both cases, interesting oscillations occurred on the PIF vs V curves. Our experimental results led us to believe that intrinsic Josephson junctions can be good candidates for high frequency applications and the harmonic mixing may be a useful probe to investigate plasma phenomena in the layered superconductors.