Photon noise from chaotic and coherent millimeter-wave sources measured with horn-coupled, aluminum lumped-element kinetic inductance detectors

Flanigan, D., McCarrick, H., Jones, G., Johnson, B. R., Abitbol, M. H., Ade, Peter ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5127-0401, Araujo, D., Bradford, K., Cantor, R., Che, G., Day, P., Doyle, Simon ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9054-986X, Kjellstrand, C. B., Leduc, H., Limon, M., Luu, V., Mauskopf, Philip ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6397-5516, Miller, A., Mroczkowski, T., Tucker, Carole ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1851-3918 and Zmuidzinas, J. 2016. Photon noise from chaotic and coherent millimeter-wave sources measured with horn-coupled, aluminum lumped-element kinetic inductance detectors. Applied Physics Letters 108 (8) , 083504. 10.1063/1.4942804

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Abstract

We report photon-noise limited performance of horn-coupled, aluminum lumped-element kinetic inductance detectors at millimeter wavelengths. The detectors are illuminated by a millimeterwave source that uses an active multiplier chain to produce radiation between 140 and 160 GHz. We feed the multiplier with either amplified broadband noise or a continuous-wave tone from a microwave signal generator. We demonstrate that the detector response over a 40 dB range of source power is well-described by a simple model that considers the number of quasiparticles. The detector noise-equivalent power (NEP) is dominated by photon noise when the absorbed power is greater than approximately 1 pW, which corresponds to NEP � 2 � 10�17WHz�1=2, referenced to absorbed power. At higher source power levels, we observe the relationships between noise and power expected from the photon statistics of the source signal: NEP / P for broadband (chaotic) illumination and NEP / P1=2 for continuous-wave (coherent) illumination.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Physics and Astronomy
Publisher:	AIP Publishing
ISSN:	00036951
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	14 July 2017
Date of Acceptance:	14 February 2016
Last Modified:	08 May 2023 19:22
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/102444

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