Effect of the Critical and Operational Temperatures on the Sensitivity of MgB2 HEB Mixers

• In this paper, we present a study of the noise and thegain of MgB hot-electron bolometer mixers with different critical temperatures and at various operation temperatures. At a local oscillator (LO) frequency of 1.63 THz the minimum input receiver noise temperature was 700 K with a gain of 18 dB for a device with a of 8.5 K. For a device with a of 22.5 K the corresponding values were 1700 K and 19 dB. For the latter device the was 2150 K at a bath temperature of 12 K, which is not achievable with Nb-compound based HEB mixers. We present and compare different methods for measurements of the HEB mixer gain and the output noise.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Fysik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Physical Sciences (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Nanoteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Nano-technology (hsv//eng)

Keyword

hot-electron bolometer (HEB)

noise temperature

conversion gain

MgB2 film

Bolometer

sub-mm astronomy

THz mixer.

Publication and Content Type

art (subject category)

ref (subject category)