Noise temperature of a 4.3 THz HEB receiver

Conference paper (2007)
Department
Kavli Institute of Nanoscience (AS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: ©2007 Khosropanah, P., Laauwen, W.M., Gao, J.R., Hajenius, M., Hovenier, J.N., Klapwijk, T.M.
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

21-09-2007

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Source:

Proceedings of SPIE, 2007 vol. 6678

Faculty

Applied Sciences

Department

Kavli Institute of Nanoscience

Abstract

We have characterized a heterodyne receiver based on an NbN hot electron bolometer integrated with spiral antenna as mixer and an optically pumped FIR ring laser at 4.3 THz as local oscillator (LO). We succeeded in measuring the receiver output power, responding to the hot/cold load, as a function of bias voltage at optimum LO power. From the resulted receiver noise temperature versus the bias voltage, we found a DSB receiver noise temperature of 3500 K at a bath temperature of 4 K, which is a minimum average value. This is the highest sensitivity reported so far at frequencies above 4 THz.