Experimental Study of Noise Temperature and Conversion Loss of SIS Junction Mixers

Abstract

Experiments on the performance of superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) tunnel junctions as heterodyne mixers at 40 GHz are reported. The techniques developed for the fabrication of multi-junction SIS series arrays differ from, and are considerably simpler than, other methods described in the literature. Results are reported on mixer noise temperature, conversion loss, saturation, local oscillator power levels and mixer dynamic range. Factors affecting the mixer's conversion performance are identified and comparisons are made with other reported results. It is concluded that mixer performance in the present experiments is limited by imperfect impedance matching at the signal frequency, due to relatively large values of parasitic capacitance in the junctions. Future work is aimed at both reducing the junction capacitance and redesigning the mixer mount to give improved r.f. matching.