In this Presidential Young Investigator grant, I expect to proceed initially with three main projects. First, I will build a broad.band submillimeter SIS heterodyne mixer with 500 GHz operation in mind. This will be used for radioastronomy with collaborators at Bell Labs, and possibly at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory. I am mainly interested in improving the technology of this receiver, and I find keeping an astronomically performing receiver to be the best tool to verify we are addressing the most pertinent technology issues. My second effort will be to begin work on Josephson oscillators for submillimeter wave radiation sources. The approach I will take is to couple many junctions together in a resonant cavity in order to achieve reasonable power levels and linewidths. My third effort is an on.going experiment with Mark F. Bocko as the principal investigator. We will use an SIS detector to investigate techniques for exceeding photon.shot.noise limitations to sensitivity in measuring a 70 GHz electric field. My contribution to this is primarily theoretical, and secondarily toward the design of the experiments.
