Shurakov, A., Tong, C. - Y. E., Blundell, R., Kaurova, N., Voronov, B., & Gol'tsman, G. (2013). Microwave stabilization of a HEB mixer in a pulse-tube cryocooler. IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercond., 23(3), 1501504.
Abstract: We report the results of our study of the stability of an 800 GHz hot electron bolometer (HEB) mixer cooled with a pulse-tube cryocooler. Pulse-tube cryocoolers introduce temperature fluctuations as well as mechanical vibrations at a frequency of ~1 Hz, both of which can cause receiver gain fluctuations at that frequency. In our system, the motor of the cryocooler was separated from the cryostat to minimize mechanical vibrations, leaving thermal effects as the dominant source of the receiver gain fluctuations. We measured root mean square temperature variations of the 4 K stage of ~7 mK. The HEB mixer was pumped by a solid state local oscillator at 810 GHz. The root mean square current fluctuations at the low noise operating point (1.50 mV, 56.5 μA) were ~0.12 μA, and were predominantly due to thermal fluctuations. To stabilize the bias current, microwave radiation was injected to the HEB mixer. The injected power level was set by a proportional-integral-derivative controller, which completely compensates for the bias current oscillations induced by the pulse-tube cryocooler. Significant improvement in the Allan variance of the receiver output power was obtained, and an Allan time of 5 s was measured.
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Melnick, G. J., Tolls, V., Neufeld, D. A., Bergin, E. A., Phillips, T. G., Wang, S., et al. (2010). Herschel observations of EXtra-Ordinary Sources (HEXOS): Observations of H2O and its isotopologues towards Orion KL. Astron. Astrophys., 521, L27.
Abstract: We report the detection of more than 48 velocity-resolved ground rotational state transitions of H216O, H218O, and H217O – most for the first time – in both emission and absorption toward Orion KL using Herschel/HIFI. We show that a simple fit, constrained to match the known emission and absorption components along the line of sight, is in excellent agreement with the spectral profiles of all the water lines. Using the measured H218O line fluxes, which are less affected by line opacity than their H216O counterparts, and an escape probability method, the column densities of H218O associated with each emission component are derived. We infer total water abundances of 7.4 × 10-5, 1.0 × 10-5, and 1.6 × 10-5 for the plateau, hot core, and extended warm gas, respectively. In the case of the plateau, this value is consistent with previous measures of the Orion-KL water abundance as well as those of other molecular outflows. In the case of the hot core and extended warm gas, these values are somewhat higher than water abundances derived for other quiescent clouds, suggesting that these regions are likely experiencing enhanced water-ice sublimation from (and reduced freeze-out onto) grain surfaces due to the warmer dust in these sources.
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Hajenius, M., Yang, Z. Q., Gao, J. R., Baselmans, J. J. A., Klapwijk, T. M., Voronov, B., et al. (2007). Optimized sensitivity of NbN hot electron bolometer mixers by annealing. IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercond., 17(2), 399–402.
Abstract: We report that the heterodyne sensitivity of superconducting hot-electron bolometers (HEBs) increases by 25-30% after annealing at 85degC in high vacuum. The devices studied are twin-slot antenna coupled mixers with a small area NbN bridge of 1 mum times 0.15 mum, above which there is a SiO 2 passivation layer. The mixer noise temperature, gain, and resistance versus temperature curve of a HEB before and after annealing are compared and analysed. We show that the annealing reduces the intrinsic noise of the mixer by 37% and makes the superconducting transition of the bridge and the contacts sharper. We argue that the reduction ofthe noise is mainly due to the improvement of the transparency of the contact/film interface. The lowest receiver noise temperature of 700 K is measured at a local oscillator frequency of 1.63 THz and at a bath temperature of 4.2 K.
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Maslennikov, S. (2014). RF heating efficiency of the terahertz superconducting hot-electron bolometer. arXiv, 1404.5276, arXiv:1404.5276.
Abstract: We report results of the numerical solution by the Euler method of the system of heat balance equations written in recurrent form for the superconducting hot-electron bolometer (HEB) embedded in an electrical circuit. By taking into account the dependence of the HEB resistance on the transport current we have been able to calculate rigorously the RF heating efficiency, absorbed local oscillator (LO) power and conversion gain of the HEB mixer. We show that the calculated conversion gai nis in excellent agreement with the experimental results, and that the substitution of the calculated RF heating efficiency and absorbed LO power into the expressions for the conversion gain and noise temperature given by the analytical small-signal model of the HEB yields excellent agreement with the corresponding measured values
Keywords: superconducting hot-electron bolometer mixer, HEB, NbN, distributed model, HEB model, HEB mixer model, heat balance equa-tions, conversion gain, RF heating efficiency, noise temperature, simulation, Euler method
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Ryabchun, S., Tong, C. -yu E., Blundell, R., Kimberk, R., & Gol’tsman, G. (2006). Effect of microwave radiation on the stability of terahertz hot-electron bolometer mixers. In M. Anwar, A. J. DeMaria, & M. S. Shur (Eds.), Proc. SPIE (Vol. 6373, 63730J (1 to 5)). SPIE.
Abstract: We report our studies of the effect of microwave radiation, with a frequency much lower than that corresponding to the energy gap of the superconductor, on the performance of the NbN hot-electron bolometer (HEB) mixer incorporated into a THz heterodyne receiver. It is shown that exposing the HEB mixer to microwave radiation does not result in a significant rise of the receiver noise temperature and degradation of the mixer conversion gain so long as the level of microwave power is small compared to the local oscillator drive. Hence the injection of a small, but controlled amount of microwave radiation enables active compensation of local oscillator power and coupling fluctuations which can significantly degrade the stability of HEB mixer receivers.
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Il'in, K. S., Gol'tsman, G. N., Voronov, B. M., & Sobolewski, R. (1999). Characterization of the electron energy relaxation process in NbN hot-electron devices. In Proc. 10th Int. Symp. Space Terahertz Technol. (pp. 390–397).
Abstract: We report on transient measurements of electron energy relaxation in NbN films with 300-fs time resolution. Using an electro-optic sampling technique, we have studied the photoresponse of 3.5-nm-thick NbN films deposited on sapphire substrates and exposed to 100-fs-wide optical pulses. Our experimental data analysis was based on the two-temperature model and has shown that in our films at the superconducting transition 10.5 K the inelastic electron-phonon scattering time was about (111}+-__.2) ps. This response time indicated that the maximum intermediate-frequency band of a NbN hot-electron phonon-cooled mixer should reach (16+41-3) GHz if one eliminates the bolometric phonon-heating effect. We have suggested several ways to increase the effectiveness of phonon cooling to achieve the above intrinsic value of the NbN mixer bandwidth.
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Semenov, A. D., Gousev, Y. P., Nebosis, R. S., Renk, K. F., Yagoubov, P., Voronov, B. M., et al. (1996). Heterodyne detection of THz radiation with a superconducting hot‐electron bolometer mixer. Appl. Phys. Lett., 69(2), 260–262.
Abstract: We report on the use of a superconducting hot‐electron bolometer mixer for heterodyne detection of terahertz radiation. Radiation with a wavelength of 119 μm was coupled to the mixer, a NbN microbridge, by a hybrid quasioptical antenna consisting of an extended hyperhemispherical lens and a planar logarithmic spiral antenna. We found, at an intermediate frequency of 1.5 GHz, a system double side band noise temperature of ≊40 000 K and conversion losses of 25 dB. We also discuss the possibilities of further improvement of the mixer performance.
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Semenov, A., Richter, H., Hübers, H. - W., Petrenko, D., Tretyakov, I., Ryabchun, S., et al. (2014). Optimization of the intermediate frequency bandwidth in the THz HEB mixers. In Proc. 25th Int. Symp. Space Terahertz Technol. (54).
Abstract: We report on the studies of the intermediate frequency (IF) bandwidth of quasi-optically coupled NbN hot-electron bolometer (HEB) mixers which are aimed at the optimization of the mixer performance at terahertz frequencies. Extension of the IF bandwidth due to the contribution of electron diffusion to the heat removal from NbN microbolometers has been already demonstrated for NbN HEBs at subterahertz frequencies. However, reducing the size of the microbolometer causes degradation of the noise temperature. Using in-situ multilayer manufacturing process we succeeded to improve the transparency of the contacts for electrons which go away from microbolometer to the metallic antenna. The improved transparency and hence coupling efficiency counterbalances the noise temperature degradation. HEB mixers were tested in a laboratory heterodyne receiver with a narrow-band cold filter which allowed us to eliminate direct detection. We used a local oscillator with a quantum cascade laser (QCL) at a frequency of 4.745 THz [1] which was developed for the H-Channel of the German Receiver for Astronomy at Terahertz frequencies (GREAT). Both the noise and gain bandwidth were measured in the IF range from 0.5 to 8 GHz using the hot-cold technique and preliminary calibrated IF analyzer with a tunable microwave filter. For optimized HEB geometry we found the noise bandwidth as large as 7 GHz. We compare our results with the conventional and the hot-spot mixer models and show that further extension of the IF bandwidth should be possible via improving the sharpness of the superconducting transition. The cross characterization of the HEB mixer was performed in the test bed of GREAT at the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie with the same QCL LO and delivered results which were consistent with the laboratory studies.
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Antipov, S., Trifonov, A., Krause, S., Meledin, D., Kaurova, N., Rudzinski, M., et al. (2019). Improved bandwidth of a 2 THz hot-electron bolometer heterodyne mixer fabricated on sapphire with a GaN buffer layer. Supercond. Sci. Technol., 32(7), 075003.
Abstract: We report on the signal-to-noise and gain bandwidth of a niobium nitride (NbN) hot-electron bolometer (HEB) mixer at 2 THz fabricated on a sapphire substrate with a GaN buffer layer. Two mixers with different DC properties and geometrical dimensions were studied and they demonstrated very close bandwidth performance. The signal-to-noise bandwidth is increased to 8 GHz in comparison to the previous results, obtained without a buffer-layer. The data were taken in a quasi-optical system with the use of the signal-to-noise method, which is close to the signal levels used in actual astrophysical observations. We find an increase of the gain bandwidth to 5 GHz. The results indicate that prior results obtained on a substrate of crystalline GaN can also be obtained on a conventional sapphire substrate with a few micron MOCVD-deposited GaN buffer-layer.
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Hübers, H. - W., Semenov, A., Schubert, J., Gol'tsman, G., Voronov, B., & Gershenzon, E. (2000). Performance of the phonon-cooled hot-electron bolometric mixer between 0.7 THz and 5.2 THz. In Proc. 8-th Int. Conf. on Terahertz Electronics (pp. 117–119).
Abstract: We report on the phonon cooled NbN hot electron bolometer as mixer in the terahertz frequency range. Its hybrid antenna consists of a hyperhemispheric silicon lens and a logarithmic-spiral feed antenna. Noise temperatures have been measured between 0.7 THz and 5.2 THz. A quarter wavelength layer of Parylene works as antireflection coating for the silicon lens and reduces the noise temperature by about 30. It was found that the antenna pattern at 2.5 THz is determined by the feed antenna and not by the diameter of the lens.
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