Nanobolometer with ultralow noise equivalent power

Abstract

Since the introduction of bolometers more than a century ago, they have been applied in a broad spectrum of contexts ranging from security and the construction industry to particle physics and astronomy. However, emerging technologies and missions call for faster bolometers with lower noise. Here, we demonstrate a nanobolometer that exhibits roughly an order of magnitude lower noise equivalent power, 20 zW/ √ Hz, than previously reported for any bolometer. Importantly, it is more than an order of magnitude faster than other low-noise bolometers, with a time constant of 30 µs at 60 zW/ √ Hz. These results suggest a calorimetric energy resolution of 0.3 zJ = h × 0.4 THz with a time constant of 30 µs. Thus the introduced nanobolometer is a promising candidate for future applications requiring extreme precision and speed such as those in astronomy and terahertz photon counting.

Reaching the ultimate energy resolution of a quantum detector

“…Here, ϵ and μ denote the single particle energy and chemical potential of the system, respectively. We illustrate the calorimeter [11][12][13][14][15] principle of our experiment and set-up in Fig. 1 16 .…”

Optimized Proximity Thermometer for Ultrasensitive Detection

“…We develop a theoretical model based on proximity superconductivity and dynamical Coulomb blockade, which captures quantitatively the measured data in their validity range. With this optimization, we increase the responsivity of this thermometer by about one order of magnitude compared to the initial realization of the concept, making it suitable for continuous detection of microwave quanta in the gigahertz range [11,27,28].…”

Thermally pumped on-chip maser

“…We derive an explicit expression for the maser power in terms of circuit parameters and show that it can reach up to few femtowatts for typical experimental conditions. This power is several orders of magnitude higher than the lowest power detectable in experiment [23][24][25][26][27][28][29]36,37]. We further show that one can detect the population inversion between the states 0 and 1 without measuring the coherent radiation output of the device.…”