Design Of Dual Polarisation Sideband Separation Mixer For ALMA Band 5

Licentiate thesis, 2009

This licentiate is focused on the design and development of Superconductor-Insulator-Superconductor (SIS) junction mixer for ALMA Band 5, one of the ten frequency bands of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) project. ALMA Band 5 is a dual polarisation sideband separation heterodyne receiver covering radio frequencies (RF) from 163 GHz to 211 GHz, with 4-8 GHz intermediate frequency (IF). Amongst the other ALMA bands, Band 5 is the lowest frequency band, which uses all-cold optics. That puts strong constrains on the dimensions of all the receiver components. For the SIS mixer, we employ a MMIC-like approach where most of the DSB mixer components, including LO injection circuitry with novel directional coupler, are integrated on the same crystal quartz substrate. The mixer uses a lumped filter technique to extract the IF frequencies, which is non-traditional for SIS mixers. A custom made superconducting Lange coupler with suspended air bridges to connect the fingers of Lange coupler is used. Experimental measurements of the double sideband mixer show state of the art performance with the receiver noise temperature below 30 Kelvin across the entire band. The noise temperature for sideband separation mixer is below 60 Kelvin with sideband rejection better than 12 dB over most of the band.