Propagation in Lossy Rectangular Waveguides

Abstract

)In millimeter and submillimeter radio astronomy, waveguide heterodyne receivers are often used in signal mixing. Wave guiding structures such as circular and rectangular waveguides are widely used in such receiver systems to direct and couple extraterrestrial signals at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths to a mixer circuit (Carter et al., 2004; Boifot et al., 1990; Withington et al., 2003). To illustrate in detail the applications of waveguides in receiver systems, a functional block diagram of a typical heterodyne receiver in radio telescopes is shown in Fig. 1 (Chattopadhyay et al., 2002). The electromagnetic signal (RF signal) from the antenna is directed down to the front end of the receiver system via mirrors and beam waveguides (Paine et al., 1994). At the front end of the receiver system, such as the sideband separating receiver designed for the ALMA band 7 cartridge (Vassilev and Belitsky, 2001a; Vassilev and Belitsky, 2001b; Vassilev et al., 2004), the RF signal is channelled from the aperture of the horn through a circular and subsequently a rectangular waveguide, before being coupled to the mixer. In the mixer circuit, a local oscillator (LO) signal which is generally of lower frequency is then mixed with the RF signal, to down convert the RF signal to a lower intermediate frequency (IF) signal. Here, a superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) heterodyne mixer is commonly implemented for the process of down conversion. At the back end of the system, the IF signal goes through multiple stages of amplification and is, eventually, fed to a data analysis system such as an acousto-optic spectrometer. The data analysis system will then be able to perform Fourier transformation and record spectral information about the input signal. The front-end receiver noise temperature TR is determined by a number of factors. These include the mixer noise temperature TM, the conversion loss CLoss, the noise temperature of the first IF amplifier TIF, and the coupling efficiency between the IF port of the junction and the input port of the first IF amplifier IF  . A comparison of the performance of different SIS waveguide receivers is listed in Table 1 (Walker et al., 1992). It can be seen that the value of TR for the 230 GHz system is a factor of 3 to 4 less than that achieved with the 492 GHz system. The decrease in system performance at 492 GHz is due to the increase of CLoss and TM by a factor of approximately 3.