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IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity

A Guide to Active Antennas Based on Superconducting Quantum Arrays

Victor K. Kornev, Aleksei Sharafiev, Igor I. Soloviev, Nikolay V. Kolotinskiy, Oleg A. Mukhanov

Published Feb 3, 2016• 9 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We describe how to use correctly an active electrically small antenna (ESA) based on superconducting quantum array (SQA) to ensure a highly linear voltage output of the antenna. An interface to the antenna ought to realize strongly mismatched loading of the active ESA. To provide the optimal conjugation of the antenna with the load device such as a low-impedance superconductor analog-to-digital converter, several measures are formulated, including the assignment of the proper SQA design configuration and the implementation of a broadband superconducting impedance transformer in the interface waveguide line. A directional diagram of the SQA-based ESA has been obtained through a three-dimensional full-wave numerical simulation.

DOI
10.1109/tasc.2016.2524461

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Using numerical simulation, we investigate the output power and loading tradeoffs for Superconducting Quantum Arrays (SQAs) suggested for the implementation of broadband radio-frequency systems, including active electrically small antennas capable of providing highly linear transfer characteristics with a high dynamic range. Standard matching loads used for linear microwave networks, including passive antennas, are not applicable for the active SQA-based circuits generally due to the strong shunting effect restricting the attainable linearity. At the same time, the output power of an active device can be increased by a power supply even for the impedance-mismatched circuits. Both the optimum achievable balance of the shunt effects and getting the required output power are analyzed and discussed in detail.
Active electrically small antennas (ESAs) based on superconducting quantum arrays (SQAs) exhibit similar sensitivity to the polarization direction as conventional magnetic ESAs. While active ESAs produce an output voltage independent of the size-to-wavelength ratio with respect to both the quantum cell and the SQA, distinct dimensional effects can appear and limit the linearity of the antenna output as this ratio increases. We analyze these dimensional effects in SQA-based active antennas of both transformer and transformer-free types.
Superconducting Quantum Arrays (SQAs), homogenous arrays of Superconducting Quantum Cells, are developed for implementation of broadband radio frequency (RF) systems capable of providing highly linear magnetic signal to voltage transfer with high dynamic range, including active electrically small antennas (ESAs). Among the proposed quantum cells which are bi-SQUID and Differential Quantum Cell (DQC), the latter delivered better performance for SQAs. A prototype of the transformer-less active ESA based on a 2D SQA with nonsuperconducting electric connection of the DQCs was fabricated using HYPRES niobium process with critical current density 4.5 kA/cm 2 . The measured voltage response is characterized by a peak-to-peak swing of ~100 mV and steepness of ~6500 μV/μT.
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