Work

Metalens-coupled terahertz NbN hot electron bolometer mixer

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Enabled by planarized phase engineering, metalenses based on metasurfaces offer compact and scalable solutions for applications such as sensing, imaging, and virtual reality. They are particularly attractive for multi-pixel, large-scale heterodyne focal plane arrays in space observatories, where a flat metalens array on a silicon wafer can replace individual lenses, greatly simplifying system integration and beam alignment. In this work, we demonstrate a superconducting niobium nitride (NbN) hot electron bolometer (HEB) mixer coupled to a silicon-based metalens operating at terahertz frequencies. The metalens phase profile was derived from a finite-size Gaussian beam source using the Rayleigh–Sommerfeld diffraction integral, and its focusing behavior was validated through 2D simulation. Experimentally, the metalens-coupled NbN HEB receiver exhibited a noise temperature of 1800 K at 1.63 THz. The power coupling efficiency from free space to the mixer via the metalens was measured to be 25%. Measured far-field beam profiles are Gaussian-like with sidelobes below −14 dB. These results demonstrate the feasibility of integrating metalenses with HEB mixers for THz detection, offering a scalable path for compact focal plane arrays in space-based THz instrumentation.

Source: Applied Physics Letters

DOI: 10.1063/5.0292184