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

Journal article, 2016

In this paper, we present a study of the noise and the gain 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.