A wideband terahertz high-Tc superconducting Josephson-junction mixer: electromagnetic design, analysis and characterization

This paper presents a wideband terahertz (THz) mixer based on a thin-film antenna-coupled high-temperature superconducting (HTS) YBa2Cu3O7-x (YBCO) step-edge Josephson junction. The HTS mixer enables the flexible harmonic mixing operation at multiple THz bands with the same microwave local oscillator (LO) source, and features very wide intermediate-frequency or instantaneous bandwidth. In order to optimize the frequency down-conversion performance of the mixer, systematic electromagnetic design and analysis have been carried out to improve the power coupling of THz radiation as well as wideband transmission of microwave signals. Experimental characterization of a fabricated device prototype has demonstrated that the mixer exhibits good performance at both the 200 GHz and 600 GHz bands. Detailed measurement results including the DC characteristics, LO pumping requirement, frequency response, mixing linearity and conversion gain are presented in this paper.