Broken-step Phenomenon in SIS Mixers

Paper in proceedings, 2016

In this paper, we discuss a “broken step” phenomenon in an SIS mixer. This phenomena was observed in the production version of the SIS mixers, designed for the 159-211 GHz RF band,being used for the construction of the ALMA Band 5 receiver The broken step typically appears at LO frequencies above 180 GHz and manifests itself as a sharp onset in the DC current at the middle of the quasiparticle step. Correspondingly, this affects the mixer IF response in a way that is similar to the Josephson step but is however of a different nature. Such behaviour affects the SIS mixer dynamic range and complicates the tuning of the 2SB mixer to optimize its performance, for both the receiver noise as well as the sideband rejection. In this paper, we describe results of a few experiments which were performed to understand this undesirable phenomenon.