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Terahertz detectors based on superconducting hot electron bolometers

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Abstract

Low noise terahertz (THz) heterodyne detectors based on superconducting niobium nitride (NbN) hot electron bolometers (HEBs) have been studied. The HEB consists of a planar antenna and an NbN bridge connecting across the antenna’s inner terminals on a high-resistivity Si substrate. The double sideband noise temperatures at 4.2 K without corrections have been characterized from 0.65 to 3.1 THz. The excess quantum noise factor β of about 4 has been obtained, which agrees well with the calculated value. Allan variance of the HEB has been measured, and Allan time up to 20 s is obtained using a microwave feedback method. Also, the intermediate frequency gain bandwidth (GBW) was measured using two different methods, resulting in same GBW value of about 3.5 GHz.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Institute of Superconductor Electronics, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, China

    Yi Jiang, BiaoBing Jin, WeiWei Xu, Lin Kang, Jian Chen & PeiHeng Wu

Authors
  1. Yi Jiang
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  2. BiaoBing Jin
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  3. WeiWei Xu
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  4. Lin Kang
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  5. Jian Chen
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  6. PeiHeng Wu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jian Chen.

Additional information

JIANG Yi was born in 1986. He is now a Ph.D. candidate in radio physics from Research Institute of Superconductor Electronics (RISE), Nanjing University (NJU), Nanjing. His research interests include terahertz spectrometer, terahertz detectors and terahertz imaging.

WU PeiHeng was born in 1939. He graduated from NJU in 1961 majoring in physics. He has been a Professor in NJU since 1985 and an academician, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) since 2005. From January 2001 to July 2001, he was a professor in RIEC, Tohoku University, Japan. His research interest includes superconducting electronics, high frequency techniques and their applications.

CHEN Jian was born in 1963. He received the B.S. and M.Sc. degrees in radio physics from NJU, in 1983 and 1986, respectively. From 1986 to 1989, he was an assistant in NJU. He received DE degree in Department of Electrical Engineering from Nagaoka University of Technology (NUT), Japan, in 1992. Then, he was an assistant in Research Institute of Electrical Communication (RIEC), Tohoku University, Japan. From 1998, he was an associate professor in RIEC. He has been a professor in NJU since 2003. He is a senior member of IEEE. His research interest includes superconducting devices and their applications.

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Jiang, Y., Jin, B., Xu, W. et al. Terahertz detectors based on superconducting hot electron bolometers. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 55, 64–71 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-011-4513-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-011-4513-3

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