We present here a small-scale liquid Helium (LHe) immersion cryostat with an innovative optical setup suitable to work in long wavelength radiation ranges and under applied magnetic field. The cryostat is a multi stage device with several shielding in addition to several optical stages. The system has been designed with an external liquid Nitrogen boiler to reduce the liquid bubbling. The optical and mechanical properties of the optical elements were calculated and optimized for the designed configuration while the optical layout has been simulated and optimized among different configurations based on the geometry of the device. The final design has been optimized for low noise radiation measurements of proximity junction arrays under applied magnetic field in the wavelength range $lambda$=250-2500 $mu$m.
A wide variety of applications of microwave cavities, such as measurement and control of superconducting qubits, magnonic resonators, and phase noise filters, would be well served by having a highly tunable microwave resonance. Often this tunability is desired in situ at low temperatures, where one can take advantage of superconducting cavities. To date, such cryogenic tuning while maintaining a high quality factor has been limited to $sim500$ MHz. Here we demonstrate a three-dimensional superconducting microwave cavity that shares one wall with a pressurized volume of helium. Upon pressurization of the helium chamber the microwave cavity is deformed, which results in in situ tuning of its resonant frequency by more than 5 GHz, greater than 60% of the original 8 GHz resonant frequency. The quality factor of the cavity remains approximately constant at $approx7times 10^{3}$ over the entire range of tuning. As a demonstration of its usefulness, we implement a tunable cryogenic phase noise filter, which reduces the phase noise of our source by approximately 10 dB above 400 kHz.
We introduce and experimentally characterize a general purpose device for signal processing in circuit quantum electrodynamics systems. The device is a broadband two-port microwave circuit element with three modes of operation: it can transmit, reflect, or invert incident signals between 4 and 8 GHz. This property makes it a versatile tool for lossless signal processing at cryogenic temperatures. In particular, rapid switching (less than or equal to 15 ns) between these operation modes enables several multiplexing readout protocols for superconducting qubits. We report the devices performance in a two-channel code domain multiplexing demonstration. The multiplexed data are recovered with fast readout times (up to 400 ns) and infidelities less than 0.01 for probe powers greater than 7 fW, in agreement with the expectation for binary signaling with Gaussian noise.
In the described device, the thermal emissivity or absorptivity of the sample is measured by substitution of the radiative heat flow between two parallel surfaces by thermal output of a heater. Fast measurements of the mutual emissivity for the range of the temperature of the radiating surface 25 K-150 K are possible. The absorbing surface has a temperature between 5 K and 10 K when LHe is used as cryoliquid. The desired measurement sensitivity is 1 mK for temperature and 0.1 {mu}W for heat power, respectively. The diameter of the whole device is 50 mm and so it is possible to use a commercial dewar can for the cooling. The form of the sample is a round plate 40 mm in diameter and 1 mm in thickness with one tested side. The emissivity and its temperature dependency for various surface treatments can be checked immediately before application in a cryogenic system.
We present a compact current sensor based on a superconducting microwave lumped-element resonator with a nanowire kinetic inductor, operating at 4.2 K. The sensor is suitable for multiplexed readout in GHz range of large-format arrays of cryogenic detectors. The device consists of a lumped-element resonant circuit, fabricated from a single 4-nm-thick superconducting layer of niobium nitride. Thus, the fabrication and operation is significantly simplified in comparison to state-of-the-art approaches. Because the resonant circuit is inductively coupled to the feed line the current to be measured can directly be injected without having the need of an impedance matching circuit, reducing the system complexity. With the proof-of-concept device we measured a current noise floor {delta}Imin of 10 pA/Hz1/2 at 10 kHz. Furthermore, we demonstrate the ability of our sensor to amplify a pulsed response of a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector using a GHz-range carrier for effective frequency-division multiplexing.
We present a cryogenic wafer mapper based on light emitting diodes (LEDs) for spatial mapping of a large microwave kinetic inductance detector (MKID) array. In this scheme, an array of LEDs, addressed by DC wires and collimated through horns onto the detectors, is mounted in front of the detector wafer. By illuminating each LED individually and sweeping the frequency response of all the resonators, we can unambiguously correspond a detector pixel to its measured resonance frequency. We have demonstrated mapping a 76.2 mm 90-pixel MKID array using a mapper containing 126 LEDs with 16 DC bias wires. With the frequency to pixel-position correspondence data obtained by the LED mapper, we have found a radially position-dependent frequency non-uniformity < 1.6% over the 76.2 mm wafer. Our LED wafer mapper has no moving parts and is easy to implement. It may find broad applications in superconducting detector and quantum computing/information experiments.