This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project is for the design and construction of a sideband-separating Superconductor-Insulator-Superconductor mixer receiver for the 380 to 500 GHz band. The receiver, whose design will mimic that used for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) 210 to 275 GHz receiver developed by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, would be deployed on the Arizona Radio Observatory's Sub-Millimeter Telescope on Mt. Graham, Arizona. The receiver would be used to study known molecular spectral lines in this region, as well as likely discover many new ones. The advantage of this design over the ALMA design is that the balanced system allows the use of much lower local oscillator power, which can be important in some instances (such as array feeds, for example) where sufficient local oscillator power is difficult to achieve.
