1. Photon noise from chaotic and coherent millimeter-wave sources measured with horn-coupled, aluminum lumped-element kinetic inductance detectors.
- Author
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Flanigan, D., McCarrick, H., Jones, G., Johnson, B. R., Abitbol, M. H., Ade, P., Araujo, D., Bradford, K., Cantor, R., Che, G., Day, P., Doyle, S., Kjellstrand, C. B., Leduc, H., Limon, M., Luu, V., Mauskopf, P., Miller, A., Mroczkowski, T., and Tucker, C.
- Subjects
PHOTONS ,SIGNAL-to-noise ratio ,ELECTRIC inductance ,WAVELENGTHS ,QUASIPARTICLES ,COSMIC background radiation - Abstract
We report photon-noise limited performance of horn-coupled, aluminum lumped-element kinetic inductance detectors at millimeter wavelengths. The detectors are illuminated by a millimeterwave 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 WHz–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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]- Published
- 2016
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