Higgins, Ronan D. and Kooi, Jacob W. (2009) Electrical standing waves in the HIFI HEB mixer amplifier chain. Proceedings of SPIE: Terahertz Technology and Applications II, 7215. pp. 1-10. ISSN 9780819474612

Download (763kB)

Abstract

The Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared (HIFI) is one of three instruments to be launched aboard the Herschel Space Observatory (HSO) in 2009. HIFI will provide unprecedented spectral sensitivity and resolution between 490–1250 GHz and 1410–1910 GHz. In this paper, we report on the analysis of electrical standing waves that are present between the hot electron bolometer (HEB) heterodyne mixing element and the first low noise amplifier in the HIFI instrument. We show that the standing wave shape is not a standard sinusoid and difficult to remove from the resulting spectrum using standard fitting methods. We present a method to remove the standing waves based on data taken during the HIFI instrument level test, and anticipate the use of a similar calibration procedure in actual flight. Using the standing wave profile we obtain direct evidence of the complex IF output impedance of the HEB mixer.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	The authors thank the gas cell team for providing the data presented in this paper and Bertrand Delforge for generating the gascell database and the tools to access it. Additionally the authors thank David Teyssier, Pourya Khosropanah, Willem Jellema, Gert de Lange and Pieter Dieleman for their insights about HIFI and the HEB IF chain. The authors would like to acknowledge the support of Enterprise Ireland (Prodex).
Keywords:	HIFI; Herschel; HEB mixer; standing wave; impedance;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > Experimental Physics
Item ID:	2472
Depositing User:	Ronan Higgins
Date Deposited:	09 Mar 2011 17:04
Journal or Publication Title:	Proceedings of SPIE: Terahertz Technology and Applications II
Publisher:	Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	http://spie.org/
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

Repository Staff Only(login required)

Item control page

Downloads

Origin of downloads