Stabilized hot electron bolometer heterodyne receiver at 2.5 THz

Abstract

We report on a method to stabilize a hot electron bolometer (HEB) mixer at 2.5 THz. The technique utilizes feedback control of the local oscillator (LO) laser power by means of a swing-arm actuator placed in the optical beam path. We demonstrate that this technique yields a factor of 50 improvement in the spectroscopic Allan variance time which is shown to be over 30 s in a 12 MHz noise fluctuation bandwidth. Furthermore, broadband signal direct detection effects may be minimized by this technique. The technique is versatile and can be applied to practically any local oscillator at any frequency.