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Kawamura J, Blundell R, Tong C‐yu E, Gol’tsman G, Gershenzon E, Voronov B. Performance of NbN lattice‐cooled hot‐electron bolometric mixers. J Appl Phys. 1996;80(7):4232–4.
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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Semenov AD, Gol’tsman GN. Nonthermal mixing mechanism in a diffusion-cooled hot-electron detector. J Appl Phys. 2000;87(1):502–10.
Abstract: We present an analysis of a diffusion-cooled hot-electron detector fabricated from clean superconducting material with low transition temperature. The distinctive feature of a clean material, i.e., material with large electron mean free path, is a relatively weak inelastic electron scattering that is not sufficient for the establishment of an elevated thermodynamic electron temperature when the detector is subjected to irradiation. We propose an athermal model of a diffusion-cooled detector that relies on suppression of the superconducting energy gap by the actual dynamic distribution of excess quasiparticles. The resistive state of the device is caused by the electric field penetrating into the superconducting bridge from metal contacts. The dependence of the penetration length on the energy gap delivers the detection mechanism. The sources of the electric noise are equilibrium fluctuations of the number of thermal quasiparticles and frequency dependent shot noise. Using material parameters typical for A1, we evaluate performance of the device in the heterodyne regime at terahertz frequencies. Estimates show that the mixer may have a noise temperature of a few quantum limits and a bandwidth of a few tens of GHz, while the required local oscillator power is in the μW range due to ineffective suppression of the energy gap by quasiparticles with high energies.
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Ren Y, Zhang DX, Zhou KM, Miao W, Zhang W, Shi SC, et al. 10.6 μm heterodyne receiver based on a superconducting hot-electron bolometer mixer and a quantum cascade laser. AIP Advances. 2019;9(7):075307.
Abstract: We report on the development of a heterodyne receiver at mid-infrared wavelength for high-resolution spectroscopy applications. The receiver employs a superconducting NbN hot electron bolometer as a mixer and a room temperature distributed feedback quantum cascade laser operating at 10.6 μm (28.2 THz) as a local oscillator. The stabilization of the heterodyne receiver has been achieved using a feedback loop controlling the output power of the laser. Improved Allan variance times as well as a double sideband receiver noise temperature of 5000 K and a noise bandwidth of 2.8 GHz of the receiver system are demonstrated.
The work is supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China under Grant 2018YFA0404701, by the CAS program under Grant QYZDJ-SSW-SLH043 and GJJSTD20180003, by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 11773083, by the “Hundred Talents Program” of the “Pioneer Initiative”, and in part by the CAS Key Lab for Radio Astronomy.
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Maslennikov S. RF heating efficiency of the terahertz superconducting hot-electron bolometer. arXiv [Internet]. 2014 [cited 2024 Jul 14];1404.5276:1–4;arXiv:1404.5276. Available from: http://arxiv.org/abs/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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Miao W, Zhang W, Zhong JQ, Shi SC, Delorme Y, Lefevre R, et al. Non-uniform absorption of terahertz radiation on superconducting hot electron bolometer microbridges. <ef><bf><bc>Appl Phys Lett. 2014;104:052605(1–4).
Abstract: We interpret the experimental observation of a frequency-dependence of superconducting hot electron bolometer (HEB) mixers by taking into account the non-uniform absorption of the terahertz radiation on the superconducting HEB microbridge. The radiation absorption is assumed to be proportional to the local surface resistance of the HEB microbridge, which is computed using the Mattis-Bardeen theory. With this assumption the dc and mixing characteristics of a superconducting niobium-nitride (NbN) HEB device have been modeled at frequencies below and above the equilibrium gap frequency of the NbN film.
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