Thursday, June 13, 2013

Abstract-Phase-locking of a terahertz solid-state source using a superconducting hot-electron bolometer mixer




W Miao, W Zhang, K M Zhou, S L Li, K Zhang, W Y Duan, Q J Yao and S C Shi


We report on a scheme whereby the local-oscillator (LO) of a THz heterodyne receiver can be phase-locked by the mixer of the heterodyne receiver. This scheme is demonstrated for the phase-locking of an 847.6 GHz Gunn oscillator and multiplier chain combined source with a superconducting hot-electron bolometer (HEB) mixer. We show that with this technique the phase-locked beat signal can reach a signal-to-noise ratio higher than 70 dB in a resolution bandwidth (RBW) of 1 Hz. This phase-locking scheme should find good use in THz heterodyne spectrometers.

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