Josephson voltage standard circuit operation with a pulse tube cooler

For a more wide-spread use of Josephson voltage standards, cryogen-free operation, by means of an appropriate closed-cycle refrigerator, is highly desirable. In this work we present a low-noise pulse tube cooler (PTC) that is capable to cool the voltage standard circuits to temperatures below 4 K. As a low loss dielectric waveguide with a very small thermal conductivity a Teflon strip was used for the microwave transmission. The matched transition from the WR12 rectangular waveguide to the Teflon strip and vice versa was made using special exponential tapers. Programmable 1 Volt 14 bit SINIS and 10 Volt SIS arrays assembled in the PTC operated well, i.e., demonstrated a similar performance to that measured in liquid helium. The Josephson junction arrays were integrated in coplanar strips instead of the commonly used microstriplines for the microwave transmission lines. The 1 Volt SINIS array contained 8192 Josephson junctions (JJs). It generated an inherently stable Josephson voltage step of 1.19 V at a driving microwave frequency of 70 GHz. The step width was 150 μA and the critical current of the junctions was 550 μA. Similar results were obtained under liquid helium cooling conditions. In another experiment a 10 Volt voltage standard chip with 19700 SIS JJs was installed. It was possible to generate stable Shapiro steps at the 10 V level.