Baselmans, J. J. A., Hajenius, M., Gao, J., de Korte, P., Klapwijk, T. M., Voronov, B., et al. (2004). Doubling of sensitivity and bandwidth in phonon-cooled hot-electron bolometer mixers. In J. Zmuidzinas, W. S. Holland, & S. Withington (Eds.), Proc. SPIE (Vol. 5498, pp. 168–176). SPIE.
Abstract: NbN hot electron bolometer (HEB) mixers are at this moment the best heterodyne detectors for frequencies above 1 THz. However, the fabrication procedure of these devices is such that the quality of the interface between the NbN superconducting film and the contact structure is not under good control. This results in a contact resistance between the NbN bolometer and the contact pad. We compare identical bolometers, with different NbN – contact pad interfaces, coupled with a spiral antenna. We find that cleaning the NbN interface and adding a thin additional superconductor prior to the gold contact deposition improves the noise temperature and the bandwidth of the HEB mixers with more than a factor of 2. We obtain a DSB noise temperature of 950 K at 2.5 THz and a Gain bandwidth of 5-6 GHz. For use in real receiver systems we design small volume (0.15x1 micron) HEB mixers with a twin slot antenna. We find that these mixers combine good sensitivity (900 K at 1.6 THz) with low LO power requirement, which is 160 – 240 nW at the Si lens of the mixer. This value is larger than expected from the isothermal technique and the known losses in the lens by a factor of 3-3.5.
|
Gao, J. R., Hajenius, M., Yang, Z. Q., Baselmans, J. J. A., Khosropanah, P., Barends, R., et al. (2007). Terahertz superconducting hot electron bolometer heterodyne receivers. IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercond., 17(2), 252–258.
Abstract: We highlight the progress on NbN hot electron bolometer (HEB) mixers achieved through fruitful collaboration between SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research and Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. This includes the best receiver noise temperatures of 700 K at 1.63 THz using a twin-slot antenna mixer and 1050 K at 2.84 THz using a spiral antenna coupled HEB mixer. The mixers are based on thin NbN films on Si and fabricated with a new contact-process and-structure. By reducing their areas HEB mixers have shown an LO power requirement as low as 30 nW. Those small HEB mixers have demonstrated equivalent sensitivity as those with large areas provided the direct detection effect due to broadband radiation is removed. To manifest that a HEB based heterodyne receiver can in practice be used at arbitrary frequencies above 2 THz, we demonstrate a 2.8 THz receiver using a THz quantum cascade laser (QCL) as local oscillator.
|
|
Hajenius, M., Baselmans, J. J. A., Baryshev, A., Gao, J. R., Klapwijk, T. M., Kooi, J. W., et al. (2006). Full characterization and analysis of a terahertz heterodyne receiver based on a NbN hot electron bolometer. J. Appl. Phys., 100(7), 074507.
|
|
Kooi, J. W., Baselmans, J. J. A., Hajenius, M., Gao, J. R., Klapwijk, T. M., Dieleman, P., et al. (2007). IF impedance and mixer gain of NbN hot electron bolometers. J. Appl. Phys., 101(4), 044511.
|
|
Wild, W., de Graauw, T., Baryshev, A., Bos, A., Gao, J. R., Gunst, A., et al. (2005). Terahertz technology for ESPRIT – a far-infrared space interferometer. In Proc. 16th Int. Symp. Space Terahertz Technol.. Göteborg, Sweden.
|
