No Arabic abstract
We present an experimental study of KIDs fabricated of atomic layer deposited TiN films, and characterized at radiation frequencies of $350$~GHz. The responsivity to radiation is measured and found to increase with increasing radiation powers, opposite to what is expected from theory and observed for hybrid niobium titanium nitride / aluminium (NbTiN/Al) and all-aluminium (all-Al) KIDs. The noise is found to be independent of the level of the radiation power. The noise equivalent power (NEP) improves with higher radiation powers, also opposite to what is observed and well understood for hybrid NbTiN/Al and all-Al KIDs. We suggest that an inhomogeneous state of these disordered superconductors should be used to explain these observations.
Thin films of TiN were sputter-deposited onto Si and sapphire wafers with and without SiN buffer layers. The films were fabricated into RF coplanar waveguide resonators, and internal quality factor measurements were taken at millikelvin temperatures in both the many photon and single photon limits, i.e. high and low power regimes, respectively. At high power, internal quality factors ($Q_i$s) higher than $10^7$ were measured for TiN with predominantly a (200)-TiN orientation. Films that showed significant (111)-TiN texture invariably had much lower $Q_i$s, on the order of $10^5$. Our studies show that the (200)-TiN is favored for growth at high temperature on either bare Si or SiN buffer layers. However, growth on bare sapphire or Si(100) at low temperature resulted in primarily a (111)-TiN orientation. Ellipsometry and Auger measurements indicate that the (200)-TiN growth on the bare Si substrates is correlated with the formation of a thin, $approx 2$ nm, layer of SiN during the pre-deposition procedure. In the single photon regime, $Q_i$ of these films exceeded $8times10^5$, while thicker SiN buffer layers led to reduced $Q_i$s at low power.
Lossy dielectrics are a significant source of decoherence in superconducting quantum circuits. In this report, we model and compare the dielectric loss in bulk and interfacial dielectrics in titanium nitride (TiN) and aluminum (Al) superconducting coplanar waveguide (CPW) resonators. We fabricate isotropically trenched resonators to produce a series of device geometries that accentuate a specific dielectric regions contribution to resonator quality factor. While each dielectric region contributes significantly to loss in TiN devices, the metal-air interface dominates the loss in the Al devices. Furthermore, we evaluate the quality factor of each TiN resonator geometry with and without a post-process hydrofluoric (HF) etch, and find that it reduced losses from the substrate-air interface, thereby improving the quality factor.
If driven sufficiently strongly, superconducting microresonators exhibit nonlinear behavior including response bifurcation. This behavior can arise from a variety of physical mechanisms including heating effects, grain boundaries or weak links, vortex penetration, or through the intrinsic nonlinearity of the kinetic inductance. Although microresonators used for photon detection are usually driven fairly hard in order to optimize their sensitivity, most experiments to date have not explored detector performance beyond the onset of bifurcation. Here we present measurements of a lumped-element superconducting microresonator designed for use as a far-infrared detector and operated deep into the nonlinear regime. The 1 GHz resonator was fabricated from a 22 nm thick titanium nitride film with a critical temperature of 2 K and a normal-state resistivity of $100, mu Omega,$cm. We measured the response of the device when illuminated with 6.4 pW optical loading using microwave readout powers that ranged from the low-power, linear regime to 18 dB beyond the onset of bifurcation. Over this entire range, the nonlinear behavior is well described by a nonlinear kinetic inductance. The best noise-equivalent power of $2 times 10^{-16}$ W/Hz$^{1/2}$ at 10 Hz was measured at the highest readout power, and represents a $sim$10 fold improvement compared with operating below the onset of bifurcation.
We report on the direct measurement of the electron-phonon relaxation time, {tau}eph, in disordered TiN films. Measured values of {tau}eph are from 5.5 ns to 88 ns in the 4.2 to 1.7 K temperature range and consistent with a T-3 temperature dependence. The electronic density of states at the Fermi level N0 is estimated from measured material parameters. The presented results confirm that thin TiN films are promising candidate-materials for ultrasensitive superconducting detectors.
We have fabricated planar amorphous Indium Oxide superconducting resonators ($T_csim2.8$ K) that are sensitive to frequency-selective radiation in the range of 7 to 10 GHz. Those values lay far below twice the superconducting gap that worths about 200 GHz. The photons detection consists in a shift of the fundamental resonance frequency. We show that the detected frequency can be adjusted by modulating the total length of the superconducting resonator. We attribute those observations to the excitation of higher-order resonance modes. The coupling between the fundamental lumped and the higher order distributed resonance is due to the kinetic inductance non-linearity with current. These devices, that we have called Sub-gap Kinetic Inductance Detectors (SKIDs), are to be distinguished from the standard Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KIDs) in which quasi-particles are generated when incident light breaks down Cooper pairs.