Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published October 1, 2006 | public
Journal Article Open

Full characterization and analysis of a terahertz heterodyne receiver based on a NbN hot electron bolometer

Abstract

We present a complete experimental characterization of a quasioptical twin-slot antenna coupled small area (1.0×0.15 µm^2) NbN hot electron bolometer (HEB) mixer compatible with currently available solid state tunable local oscillator (LO) sources. The required LO power absorbed in the HEB is analyzed in detail and equals only 25 nW. Due to the small HEB volume and wide antenna bandwidth, an unwanted direct detection effect is observed which decreases the apparent sensitivity. Correcting for this effect results in a receiver noise temperature of 700 K at 1.46 THz. The intermediate frequency (IF) gain bandwidth is 2.3 GHz and the IF noise bandwidth is 4 GHz. The single channel receiver stability is limited to 0.2–0.3 s in a 50 MHz bandwidth.

Additional Information

©2006 American Institute of Physics (Received 24 November 2005; accepted 8 July 2006; published online 11 October 2006) We thank B. Voronov and G. Gol'tsman for providing us with the NbN films, JPL for making available the tunable solid state LO chain for our experiment, and the help of J. Kawamura thereby. The work is supported financially by the EU through RadioNet and INTAS program.

Files

HAJjap06.pdf
Files (996.9 kB)
Name Size Download all
md5:7413663c9f45857d22c79fb2d7fe3880
996.9 kB Preview Download

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 16, 2023