| I have designed, built and tested a low noise dc Superconducting QUantum Interference Device (SQUID) system which is intended primarily for use in a 50 mK omnidirectional gravity wave antenna. The SQUID system has three SQUIDs on a single chip: one SQUID is the sensor, another SQUID is the main readout, and the last is a spare readout. For good impedance matching between the sensor SQUID and the input circuit, I use a thin-film transformer. This thin-film transformer gives an input inductance of about 1 ;I have designed and tested an eddy-current damping filter as a distributed microwave filter to damp out microwave resonances in strip-line input coils coupled to SQUIDs. The filter chip consists of a Au/Cu-dot array. The filter chip was coupled to the SQUID using a flip-chip arrangement on the SQUID chip. I found that the filter reduced noise bumps and removed distortion from the current-voltage curves.;To flux-lock the SQUID system, I developed 2-stage SQUID feedback loops. I investigated two cascade SQUID systems in which I feed the feedback signal into the sensor SQUID and couple the ac modulation signal to the readout SQUID. I found that the noise spectrum with 2-SQUID feedback operation recovers the noise spectrum of the sensor SQUID with about 9% higher noise. |
