Oxford Instruments’ Customers win IEEE Van Duzer Prize

Prof Leonid Kuzmin and co-authors from the Department of Microtechnology and NanoScience at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden have won the 2011 IEEE Van Duzer prize for the best contributed paper published in IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity.

Oxford Instruments Nanoscience has a long history of collaboration with Prof Leonid Kuzmin, having supplied systems to support his research on Cold Electron Bolometers (CEB).

Prof Kuzmin and co-workers have won the prize for their paper entitled "Optical Response of a Cold-Electron Bolometer Array Integrated in a 345-GHz Cross-Slot Antenna". In this article, the research mentioned used a Helium-3 refrigerator to measure the optical response of a Cold-Electron-Bolometer array at 300µK. Electron cooling was measured at 100 µK using a dilution refrigerator.

Leonid Kuzmin said: “Oxford Instruments equipment was key to this research as we needed a low temperature environment with a very high temperature stability and low-noise operation. We managed to measure optical response with noise equivalent power down to 2*10-17 W/Hz1/2 and electrical NEP=6*10-18 W/Hz1/2. The fluctuation sensitivity to radiation temperature down to 1.3*10-4 K/Hz1/2 was possible to measure due to very high stability of both Oxford Instruments’ cryostats, Heliox and Triton.”

“Using our array of superconductor-insulator-normal metal (SIN) tunnel junctions we have been able to measure a temperature stability below ±250 µK over a period of 8 hours with a temperature resolution of ±100 µK,” he added.

Prof Kuzmin has received a Government Megagrant to set-up a modern Laboratory of Cryogenic Nanoelectronics in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. He is also planning to set-up a Research Center in the new Government Center of Research and Education Skolkovo prolonging its extensive collaboration with Oxford Instruments.