2015/10/31 by D. Flanigan, Daniel Flanigan, Heather McCarrick +30 · 25 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Detector #Inductance #Kinetic inductance #Noise (video) #Optics #Photon #Physics #Quantum noise #Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit Design #Superconducting and THz Device Technology #Terahertz technology and applications #astro-ph.IM #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/1.4942804
published in Applied Physics Letters 108(8) (American Institute of Physics) · Matches published version (which is open access) and includes supplemental material
openalex publication_date 2016/02/22 · arxiv created 2017/05/24 · arxiv updated 2017/05/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We report photon-noise limited performance of horn-coupled, aluminum lumped-element kinetic inductance detectors at millimeter wavelengths. The detectors are illuminated by a millimeter-wave 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≈2×10−17 W Hz−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.