Injection locking and noise reduction of resonant tunneling diode terahertz oscillator

Abstract

We studied the injection-locking properties of a resonant-tunneling-diode terahertz oscillator in the small-signal injection regime with a frequency-stabilized continuous THz wave. The linewidth of the emission spectrum dramatically decreased to less than 120 mHz (half width at half maximum) from 4.4 MHz in the free running state as a result of the injection locking. We experimentally determined the amplitude of injection voltage at the antenna caused by the injected THz wave. The locking range was proportional to the injection amplitude and consistent with Adler’s model. While increasing the injection amplitude, we observed a decrease in the noise component of the power spectrum, which manifests the free-running state, and an alternative increase in the injection-locked component. The noise component and the injection-locked component had the same power at the threshold injection amplitude as small as 5 × 10−4 of the oscillation amplitude. This threshold behavior can be qualitatively explained by Maffezzoni’s model of noise reduction in general limit-cycle oscillators.