A Study on the Fabrication and Design of Superconducting Tunnel junction for Millimeter Wave Mixers

밀리미터파 믹서용 초전도 턴넬 접합 설계와 제작에 관한 연구

Because of their high sensitivity and moderate bandwidth, superconducting receivers with SIS (Superconductor Insulator Superconductor) tunnel junction mixer are now widely used for millimeter wave radio astronomy. In this paper we have introduced how to determine the parameters of SIS tunnel junction which have to be optimized to achieve a good mixer performance. From these results of optimized junction parameters determined by this methods, SIS junctions which consist of a series array of four Nb/Al-AlOx/Nb junctions with each area 3.4${\mu}m^{2}$ have been fabricated by SNEP (Selective Niobium Etching Process) and RIE (Reactive Ion Eching). Also we have tested their DC current-voltage characteristics. These SIS junctions will be used as a mixer for 100GHz band cosmic waves receiver.