Performance of the first ALMA Band 5 production cartridge

Paper i proceeding, 2011

We present performance of the first ALMA Band 5 production cartridge, covering RF frequencies from 163 GHz to 211 GHz. ALMA Band 5 is a dual polarization, sideband separation (2SB) receiver based on all Niobium (Nb) SuperconductorInsulator-Superconductor (SIS) tunnel junction mixer, providing 16 GHz of instantaneous RF bandwidth for the astronomy observations. The 2SB mixer for each polarization employs a quadrature layout. The sideband separation occurs at the output of the IF hybrid that has integrated bias-T for biasing the mixers, and is produced using superconducting thin film technology. Experimental verification of the Band 5 cold cartridge performed together with warm cartridge assembly, confirms the system noise temperature below 45 K, less than five quantum noise (5 hf/k) over most of the RF band, which is to our knowledge, the best results at these frequencies. The measurement of the sideband rejection indicates that the sideband rejection better than 10 dB over 90% of the observational band.