We report on the status and development of polarization-sensitive detectors for millimeter-wave applications. The detectors are fabricated on single-crystal silicon, which functions as a low-loss dielectric substrate for the microwave circuitry as well as the supporting membrane for the Transition-Edge Sensor (TES) bolometers. The orthomode transducer (OMT) is realized as a symmetric structure and on-chip filters are employed to define the detection bandwidth. A hybridized integrated enclosure reduces the high-frequency THz mode set that can couple to the TES bolometers. An implementation of the detector architecture at Q-band achieves 90% efficiency in each polarization. The design is scalable in both frequency coverage, 30-300 GHz, and in number of detectors with uniform characteristics. Hence, the detectors are desirable for ground-based or space-borne instruments that require large arrays of efficient background-limited cryogenic detectors.
@article{arxiv.1408.4790,
title = {Scalable background-limited polarization-sensitive detectors for mm-wave applications},
author = {Karwan Rostem and Aamir Ali and John W. Appel and Charles L. Bennett and David T. Chuss and Felipe A. Colazo and Erik Crowe and Kevin L. Denis and Tom Essinger-Hileman and Tobias A. Marriage and Samuel H. Moseley and Thomas R. Stevenson and Deborah W. Towner and Kongpop U-Yen and Edward J. Wollack},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.4790},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
7 pages, 3 figures, Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation 2014: Millimeter, Submillimeter, and Far-Infrared Detectors and Instrumentation for Astronomy VII. To be published in Proceedings of SPIE Volume 9153