Electrical and optical properties of a bolometer with a suspended absorber and tunneling-current thermometers

We have developed a bolometer with a suspended normal-metal absorber connected to superconducting leads via tunneling barriers. Such an absorber has reduced heat losses to the substrate, which greatly increases the responsivity of the bolometer to over 10(9) V/W at 75 mK when measured by dc Joule heating of the absorber. For high-frequency experiments, the bolometers have been integrated in planar twin-slot and log-periodic antennas. At 300GHz and 100 mK, the bolometer demonstrates the voltage and current response of 3 x 10(8) V/W and 1.1 x 10(4) A/W, respectively, corresponding to the quantum efficiency of similar to 15 electrons per photon. An effective thermalization of electrons in the absorber favors the high quantum efficiency. We also report on how the in-plane-and transverse magnetic fields influence the device characteristics