Recent developments in superconducting receivers

A description is given of recent work at Berkeley on superconducting mixers and detectors for infrared and millimeter wavelengths. The first report is a review article which summarizes the status of development of superconducting components for infrared and millimeter wave receivers. The next report describes accurate measurements and also theoretical modeling of an SIS quasiparticle waveguide mixer for W-band which uses very high quality Ta junctions. The best mixer noise is only 1.3 times the quantum limit. Both the mixer gain and the noise are in quantitative agreement with the quantum theory. Next, a report is given on measurements and theoretical modeling of the absorptivity (surface resistance) of high quality epitaxial films of the high Tc superconductor YBCO from 750 GHz to 21 THz. Finally, there are reports on the design and experimental performance of two different types of high Tc bolometric detectors. One is a conventional bolometer with a gold-black absorber. The other is an antenna coupled microbolometer.