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Meledin, D. V., Marrone, D. P., Tong, C. - Y. E., Gibson, H., Blundell, R., Paine, S. N., et al. (2004). A 1-THz superconducting hot-electron-bolometer receiver for astronomical observations. IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Techn., 52(10), 2338–2343.
Abstract: In this paper, we describe a superconducting hot-electron-bolometer mixer receiver developed to operate in atmospheric windows between 800-1300 GHz. The receiver uses a waveguide mixer element made of 3-4-nm-thick NbN film deposited over crystalline quartz. This mixer yields double-sideband receiver noise temperatures of 1000 K at around 1.0 THz, and 1600 K at 1.26 THz, at an IF of 3.0 GHz. The receiver was successfully tested in the laboratory using a gas cell as a spectral line test source. It is now in use on the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory terahertz test telescope in northern Chile.
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Kawamura, J., Blundell, R., Tong, C. ‐yu E., Gol’tsman, G., Gershenzon, E., & Voronov, B. (1996). Performance of NbN lattice‐cooled hot‐electron bolometric mixers. J. Appl. Phys., 80(7), 4232–4234.
Abstract: The heterodyne performance of lattice‐cooled hot‐electron bolometric mixers is measured at 200 GHz. Superconducting thin‐film niobium nitride strips with ∼5 nm thickness are used as waveguide mixer elements. A double‐sideband receiver noise temperature of 750 K at 244 GHz is measured at an intermediate frequency centered at 1.5 GHz with 500 MHz bandwidth and with 4.2 K device temperature. The instantaneous bandwidth for this mixer is 1.6 GHz. The local oscillator power required by the mixer is about 0.5 μW. The mixer is linear to within 1 dB up to an input power level 6 dB below the local oscillator power. A receiver incorporating a hot‐electron bolometric mixer was used to detect molecular line emission in a laboratory gascell. This experiment unambiguously confirms that the receiver noise temperature determined from Y‐factor measurements reflects the true heterodyne sensitivity.
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Tong, C. E., Blundell, R., Papa, D. C., Smith, M., Kawamura, J., Gol'tsman, G., et al. (1999). An all solid-state superconducting heterodyne receiver at terahertz frequencies. IEEE Microw. Guid. Wave Lett., 9(9), 366–368.
Abstract: A superconducting hot-electron bolometer mixer-receiver operating from 1 to 1.26 THz has been developed. This heterodyne receiver employs two solid-state local oscillators each consisting of a Gunn oscillator followed by two stages of varactor frequency multiplication. The measured receiver noise temperature is 1350 K at 1.035 THz and 2700 K at 1.26 THz. This receiver demonstrates that tunable solid-state local oscillators, supplying only a few micro-watts of output power, can be used in terahertz receiver applications.
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Kawamura, J. H., Tong, C. - Y. E., Blundell, R., Cosmo Papa, D., Hunter, T. R., Gol'tsman, G., et al. (1999). An 800 GHz NbN phonon-cooled hot-electron bolometer mixer receiver. IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercond., 9(2), 3753–3756.
Abstract: We describe a heterodyne receiver developed for astronomical applications to operate in the 350 /spl mu/m atmospheric window. The waveguide receiver employs a superconductive NbN phonon-cooled hot-electron bolometer mixer. The double sideband receiver noise temperature closely follows 1 kGHz/sup -1/ across 780-870 GHz, with the intermediate frequency centered at 1.4 GHz. The conversion loss is about 15 dB. The receiver was installed for operation at the University of Arizona/Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy Submillimeter Telescope facility. The instrument was successfully used to conduct test observations of a number of celestial sources in a number of astronomically important spectral lines.
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Trifonov, A., Tong, C. - Y. E., Blundell, R., Ryabchun, S., & Gol'tsman, G. (2015). Probing the stability of HEB mixers with microwave injection. IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercond., 25(3), 2300404 (1 to 4).
Abstract: Using a microwave probe as a tool, we have performed experiments aimed at understanding the origin of the output-power fluctuations in hot-electron-bolometer (HEB) mixers. We use a probe frequency of 1.5 GHz. The microwave probe picks up impedance changes of the HEB, which are examined upon demodulation of the reflected wave outside the cryostat. This study shows that the HEB mixer operates in two different regimes under a terahertz pump. At a low pumping level, strong pulse modulation is observed, as the device switches between the superconducting state and the normal state at a rate of a few megahertz. When pumped much harder, to approximate the low-noise mixer operating point, residual modulation can still be observed, showing that the HEB mixer is intrinsically unstable even in the resistive state. Based on these observations, we introduced a low-frequency termination to the HEB mixer. By terminating the device in a 50-Ω resistor in the megahertz frequency range, we have been able to improve the output-power Allan time of our HEB receiver by a factor of four to about 10 s for a detection bandwidth of 15 MHz, with a corresponding gain fluctuation of about 0.035%.
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