Photon noise from chaotic and coherent millimeter-wave sources measured with horn-coupled, aluminum lumped-element kinetic inductance detectors

Creators: Flanigan, D.; McCarrick, H.; Jones, G.; Johnson, B. R.; Abitbol, M. H.; Ade, P.; Araujo, D.; Bradford, K.; Cantor, R.; Che, G.; Day, P. K.; Doyle, S.; Kjellstrand, C. B.; Leduc, H.; Limon, M.; Luu, V.; Mauskopf, P.; Miller, A.; Mroczkowski, T.; Tucker, C.; Zmuidzinas, J.

Abstract

We report photon-noise limited performance of horn-coupled, aluminum lumped-element kinetic inductance detectors at millimeter wavelengths. The detectors are illuminated by a millimeter-wave source that uses an active multiplier chain to produce radiation between 140 and 160 GHz. We feed the multiplier with either amplified broadband noise or a continuous-wave tone from a microwave signal generator. We demonstrate that the detector response over a 40 dB range of source power is well-described by a simple model that considers the number of quasiparticles. The detector noise-equivalent power (NEP) is dominated by photonnoise when the absorbed power is greater than approximately 1 pW, which corresponds to NEP ≈ 2×10^(−17) W Hz^(−1/2), referenced to absorbed power. At higher source power levels, we observe the relationships between noise and power expected from the photon statistics of the source signal: NEP∝P for broadband (chaotic) illumination and NEP∝P^(1/2) for continuous-wave (coherent) illumination.

Additional Information

© 2016 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Received 20 October 2015; accepted 14 February 2016; published online 25 February 2016. R.C. is both an author and the owner of STAR Cryoelectronics. H.M. is supported by a NASA Earth and Space Sciences Fellowship. T.M. is supported by a National Research Council Fellowship. This research is supported, in part, by a grant from the Research Initiatives for Science and Engineering program at Columbia University to B.R.J. and by internal Columbia University funding to A.M. We thank the Xilinx University Program for their donation of FPGA hardware and software tools used in the readout system. We thank the anonymous reviewers for thoughtful and helpful comments.

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