Development of Local Oscillators for CASIMIR

We present the development of three local oscillator chains to be used on the CASIMIR (Caltech Airborne Submillimeter Interstellar Medium Investigations Receiver) instrument onboard the SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) aircraft. All three chains use all solidstate GaAs-based components to amplify and multiply a ~1-3 mW input signal at W band. At room temperature, the 900 GHz source produces 50-100 !W of power from 800 to 930 GHz. The 1 THz source produces 50-120 !W of power from 960 to 1045 GHz. The 1.4 THz source produces 10-70 !W of power from 1320 to 1470 GHz. When cooled to 120 K, the 1.4 THz chain’s output power increases by approximately 3 dB with a peak power of 129 !W at 1395 GHz. Index Terms – CASIMIR, local oscillator, terahertz source, frequency multiplier, cascaded multipliers, GaAs Schottky diode, submillimeter wavelengths.