Optical characterisation of a strained-silicon cold-electron bolometer at 160 GHz

Brien, Thomas, Ade, Peter A. R. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5127-0401, Barry, Peter, Dunscombe, Christopher, Leadley, D. R., Morozov, Dmitry, Myronov, M., Parker, E. H. C, Prest, Martin, Prunnila, M., Sudiwala, Rashmikant ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3240-5304, Whall, T. E. and Mauskopf, Philip Daniel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6397-5516 2015. Optical characterisation of a strained-silicon cold-electron bolometer at 160 GHz. Presented at: 2015 8th UK, Europe, China Millimeter Waves and THz Technology Workshop (UCMMT), Cardiff, UK, 14-15 Sept. 2015. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?punumber=7455173. 2015 8th UK, Europe, China Millimeter Waves and THz Technology Workshop (UCMMT), Cardiff, United Kingdom, 2015. pp. 1-4. 10.1109/UCMMT.2015.7460630

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Abstract

We present a study of a cold-electron bolometer operating at 350 mK with a twin-slot antenna coupling radiation at 160 GHz. The detector’s absorbing element consists of degenerately-doped strained silicon and has Schottky contacts to superconducting aluminium leads. These contacts allow for direct electron cooling of the absorber to below the phonon temperature, enabling the cold-electron bolometer to achieve much faster time constants (τ < 1 μs) compared to conventional bolometric detectors while not sacrificing sensitivity. We measure both the dark and optically-loaded noise of the detector via a novel method of cross-correlating the outputs of two amplifiers in order to measure noise below the amplifier noise level. From this we measure the photon-noise limited noise-equivalent power of the detector to be 6.6×10^−17 W/rtHz when observing a 77-Kelvin source.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Physics and Astronomy
Subjects:	Q Science > QB Astronomy Q Science > QC Physics
Funders:	STFC, EPSRC, Academy of Finland
Date of Acceptance:	14 September 2015
Last Modified:	11 Jan 2023 17:10
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/90786

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