Coherent terahertz emission from Bi₂Sr₂CaCu₂O_8+δ intrinsic Josephson junction stacks

In recent years, terahertz technology has become a rapidly growing sector, driven by the demands of a vast range of (potential) applications. The terahertz spectral range roughly spans from 300 GHz to 30 THz. In the low terahertz range, there is a lack of good and compact devices, that emit electromagnetic waves. Particularly, coherent, narrow-band and continuous-wave sources are lacking, and researchers are following many different approaches to fill this gap. The thesis at hand contributes to the exploration of one of those sources: Operating intrinsic Josephson junctions as emitters in the terahertz spectral range. Josephson junctions (JJs) work as direct current (dc) voltage to frequency converters, if operated in the resistive state. 1 mV voltage drop generates a frequency of about 484 GHz. Intrinsic Josephson junctions (IJJs) in the high temperature superconductor Bi₂Sr₂CaCu₂O_8+δ (BSCCO) are adequate candidates for emitting devices; the layered structure of the material intrinsically provides stacks consisting of 1.5 nm thick, nearly perfectly equal JJs. The fabrication of a series of hundreds of JJs in a stack of micrometer thickness is easily feasible, which is essential for high power frequency generation. Further, the energy gap of BSCCO is in principle large enough to allow for frequencies up to more than 10 THz. The key challenge is the synchronization of all IJJs in order to produce coherent radiation. In 2007, a research team from Argonne National Laboratories succeeded in detecting coherent terahertz radiation from more than 500 synchronized IJJs in a mesa structure. The frequencies ranged from 350 to 850 GHz with output powers up to 0.5 μW. They proposed the formation of electromagnetic standing waves in the cavity of the mesa as synchronization mechanism. Coming from the fully resistive state (nonzero voltage across all junctions), the radiation occurred in the bias regime, where groups of junctions switch back to the zero voltage state and heating is not severe, as observed for higher dc input power. For the present thesis, similar structures have been fabricated by H.B. Wang from the National Institute for Material Science in Japan. As preliminary studies suggested, the terahertz emission should also take place for higher input powers, where two electrothermal domains have formed in the mesa, a hot spot and a colder, still superconducting part. This presumption could be confirmed within the present work. Imaging with low-temperature scanning laser microscopy (LTSLM) allowed us to visualize the hot spots in combination with standing wave patterns in the terahertz emission regime. Using various sample geometries, we were able to demonstrate the interaction between the wave patterns and the hot spot, as well as the deliberate manipulation of these processes. In order to determine the linewidth of the radiation, measurements with a superconducting integrated receiver were performed in collaboration with the Kotel'nikov Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics in Moscow. These measurements revealed a linewidth of about 50 MHz in the presence of a hot spot, which is one order of magnitude smaller as compared to radiation occurring for low bias currents, where no hot spot is present. Investigating the heat balance in one of our mesas from a theoretical perspective, we showed that the formation of electrothermal domains (in particular hot spots) is founded in the strong temperature dependence of the electrical conductivity in c-axis direction of BSCCO. Solving the heat-diffusion equation in three dimensions for the actual sample geometry allowed us to establish realistic temperature profiles of our samples. Most samples that feature coherent terahertz emission were fabricated in a mesa geometry. We showed that samples fabricated with the so-called double-sided fabrication technique emit terahertz radiation in a similar manner.