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The superconducting unbiased parametric amplifier can be saturated by low levels of broadband thermal radiation. Saturation increases the fluctuation noise temperature and complicates the determination of the operating parameters of this device. In this paper the theory of the thermally saturated SUPARAMP is presented. It is found that a particular amplifier can be described by a characteristic temperature, its maximum possible output brightness temperature. The implications of this theory for the interpretation of past experiments and for the design of future experiments are discussed.
M. J. Feldman (Tue,) studied this question.