We have designed superinductors made of strongly disordered superconductors for implementation in hybrid superconducting quantum circuits. The superinductors have been fabricated as meandered nanowires made of granular Aluminum films. Optimization of the device geometry enabled realization of superinductors with the inductance $sim 1 {mu}H$ and the self-resonance frequency over 3 GHz. These compact superinductors are attractive for a wide range of applications, from superconducting circuits for quantum computing to microwave elements of cryogenic parametric amplifiers and kinetic-inductance photon detectors.
Superconducting microwave circuits based on coplanar waveguides (CPW) are susceptible to parasitic slotline modes which can lead to loss and decoherence. We motivate the use of superconducting airbridges as a reliable method for preventing the propagation of these modes. We describe the fabrication of these airbridges on superconducting resonators, which we use to measure the loss due to placing airbridges over CPW lines. We find that the additional loss at single photon levels is small, and decreases at higher drive powers.
The introduction of crystalline defects or dopants can give rise to so-called dirty superconductors, characterized by reduced coherence length and quasiparticle mean free path. In particular, granular superconductors such as Granular Aluminum (GrAl), consisting of remarkably uniform grains connected by Josephson contacts have attracted interest since the sixties thanks to their rich phase diagram and practical advantages, like increased critical temperature, critical field, and kinetic inductance. Here we report the measurement and modeling of circuit quantum electrodynamics properties of GrAl microwave resonators in a wide frequency range, up to the spectral superconducting gap. Interestingly, we observe self-Kerr coefficients ranging from $10^{-2}$ Hz to $10^5$ Hz, within an order of magnitude from analytic calculations based on GrAl microstructure. This amenable nonlinearity, combined with the relatively high quality factors in the $10^5$ range, open new avenues for applications in quantum information processing and kinetic inductance detectors.
We demonstrate that a high kinetic inductance disordered superconductor can realize a low microwave loss, non-dissipative circuit element with an impedance greater than the quantum resistance ($R_Q = h/4e^2 simeq 6.5kOmega$). This element, known as a superinductor, can produce a quantum circuit where charge fluctuations are suppressed. The superinductor consists of a 40 nm wide niobium nitride nanowire and exhibits a single photon quality factor of $2.5 times 10^4$. Furthermore, by examining loss rates, we demonstrate that the dissipation of our nanowire devices can be fully understood in the framework of two-level system loss.
The presence of free spins in granular Al films is directly demonstrated by $mu$SR measurements. A Mott transition is observed by probing the increase of the spin-flip scattering rate of conduction electrons as the nano-size metallic grains are being progressively decoupled. Analysis of the magneto-resistance in terms of an effective Fermi energy shows that it becomes of the order of the grains electrostatic charging energy at a room temperature resistivity $rho approx 50,000~muOmega~cm$, at which a metal to insulator transition is known to exist. As this transition is approached the magneto-resistance exhibits a Heavy-Fermion like behavior, consistent with an increased electron effective mass.
We report conductance measurements in quantum wires made of aluminum arsenide, a heavy-mass, multi-valley one-dimensional (1D) system. Zero-bias conductance steps are observed as the electron density in the wire is lowered, with additional steps observable upon applying a finite dc bias. We attribute these steps to depopulation of successive 1D subbands. The quantum conductance is substantially reduced with respect to the anticipated value for a spin- and valley-degenerate 1D system. This reduction is consistent with disorder-induced, intra-wire backscattering which suppresses the transmission of 1D modes. Calculations are presented to demonstrate the role of strain in the 1D states of this cleaved-edge structure.