Production of high quality Nb/Al-oxide/Nb SIS trilayers for submillimeter wave mixers |
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Authors: | E E Bloemhof |
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Institution: | (1) California Institute of Technology, Mail Stop 105-24, 91125 Pasadena, California |
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Abstract: | Owing to a very sharp nonlinearity in the quasiparticle currentvoltage characteristic, which fortuitously occurs on the scale
of a few millivolts rather than a few volts as with semiconductor devices, superconductor/insulator/superconductor (SIS) tunnel
junctions are the most sensitive detectors for heterodyne mixing at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths. They can also
provide sources of coherent local oscillator power at very high frequencies; more broadly, they have a number of interesting
applications as fast, low-power logic elements and as detectors at optical wavelengths. For submillimeterwave mixers, in many
ways the most demanding of these applications, the Nb/Al-oxide/Nb material system has emerged as the system of choice to frequencies
of ∼ 700 GHz and beyond. Production of SIS devices requires careful attention to a number of critical microfabrication issues,
and I describe here some of the insights gained from developing a process for high-quality niobium trilayers that successfully
yielded small-area junctions with unusually low sub-gap leakage current. |
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Keywords: | mixers SIS submillimeter techniques |
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