Development of 1.5 THz waveguide NbTiN superconducting hot electron bolometer mixers
Ling Jiang, Shoichi Shiba, Tatsuya Shiino +7 more
We present a characterization of a 1.5 THz waveguide niobium titanium nitride (NbTiN) superconducting hot electron bolometer (HEB) mixer which can be pumped by a commercial solid state tunable local oscillator (LO) source. The NbTiN HEB mixer is made from a 12 nm thick NbTiN thin film deposited on a quartz substrate at room temperature. A gold electrode is formed in situ on the NbTiN thin film without breaking vacuum to ensure good contact. The uncorrected DSB receiver noise temperature is measured to be 1700 K at 1.5 THz, whereas the mixer noise temperature is derived to be 1000 K after corrections for losses of the input optics and the intermediate frequency (IF) amplifier chain. The required LO power absorbed in the HEB mixer is evaluated to be 340 nW by using an isothermal technique. The IF gain bandwidth is supposed to be about 1.3 GHz or higher. The present results show that good performance can be obtained at 1.5 THz even with a relatively thick NbTiN film (12 nm), as in the case of 0.8 THz. In order to investigate the cooling mechanism of our HEB mixers, we have conducted performance measurements for a few HEB mixers with different microbridge sizes both at 1.5 and 0.8 THz. The noise performance of the NbTiN HEB mixers is found to depend on the length of the NbTiN microbridge. The shorter the microbridge is, the lower the receiver noise temperature is. This may imply a contribution of the diffusion cooling in addition to the phonon cooling.
Superconductor Science and Technology•Mar 19, 2010•20 citations