No Arabic abstract
We present a comprehensive study of internal quality factors in superconducting stub-geometry 3-dimensional cavities made of aluminum. We use wet etching, annealing and electrochemichal polishing to improve the as machined quality factor. We find that the dominant loss channel is split between two-level system loss and an unknown source with 60:40 proportion. A total of 17 cavities of different purity, resonance frequency and size were studied. Our treatment results in reproducible cavities, with ten of them showing internal quality factors above 80 million at a power corresponding to an average of a single photon in the cavity. The best cavity has an internal quality factor of 115 million at single photon level.
Ultrashort, low-emittance electron pulses can be created at a high repetition rate by using a TM$_{110}$ deflection cavity to sweep a continuous beam across an aperture. These pulses can be used for time-resolved electron microscopy with atomic spatial and temporal resolution at relatively large average currents. In order to demonstrate this, a cavity has been inserted in a transmission electron microscope, and picosecond pulses have been created. No significant increase of either emittance or energy spread has been measured for these pulses. At a peak current of $814pm2$ pA, the root-mean-square transverse normalized emittance of the electron pulses is $varepsilon_{n,x}=(2.7pm0.1)cdot 10^{-12}$ m rad in the direction parallel to the streak of the cavity, and $varepsilon_{n,y}=(2.5pm0.1)cdot 10^{-12}$ m rad in the perpendicular direction for pulses with a pulse length of 1.1-1.3 ps. Under the same conditions, the emittance of the continuous beam is $varepsilon_{n,x}=varepsilon_{n,y}=(2.5pm0.1)cdot 10^{-12}$ m rad. Furthermore, for both the pulsed and the continuous beam a full width at half maximum energy spread of $0.95pm0.05$ eV has been measured.
We present the driven response at T=30mK of 6 GHz superconducting resonators constructed from capacitively-shunted three dimensional (3D) aluminum nanobridge superconducting quantum interference devices (nanoSQUIDs). We observe flux modulation of the resonant frequency in quantitative agreement with numerical calculation and characteristic of near-ideal short weak link junctions. Under strong microwave excitation, we observe stable bifurcation in devices with coupled quality factor (Q) ranging from ~30-3500. Near this bias point, parametric amplification with > 20dB gain, 40 MHz bandwidth, and near quantum-limited noise performance is observed. Our results indicate that 3D nanobridge junctions are attractive circuit elements to realize quantum bits.
Quantum bits (qubits) with long coherence times are an important element for the implementation of medium- and large-scale quantum computers. In the case of superconducting planar qubits, understanding and improving qubits quality can be achieved by studying superconducting planar resonators. In this Paper, we fabricate and characterize coplanar waveguide resonators made from aluminum thin films deposited on silicon substrates. We perform three different substrate treatments prior to aluminum deposition: One chemical treatment based on a hydrofluoric acid clean, one physical treatment consisting of a thermal annealing at 880 degree Celsius in high vacuum, one combined treatment comprising both the chemical and the physical treatments. We first characterize the fabricated samples through cross-sectional tunneling electron microscopy acquiring electron energy loss spectroscopy maps of the samples cross sections. These measurements show that both the chemical and the physical treatments almost entirely remove native silicon oxide from the substrate surface and that their combination results in the cleanest interface. We then study the quality of the resonators by means of microwave measurements in the quantum regime, i.e., at a temperature T~10 mK and at a mean microwave photon number $langle n_{textrm{ph}} rangle sim 1$. In this regime, we find that both surface treatments independently improve the resonators intrinsic quality factor and that the highest quality factor is obtained for the combined treatment, $Q_{textrm{i}} sim 0.8$ million. Finally, we find that the TLS quality factor averaged over a time period of 3 h is $sim 3$ million at $langle n_{textrm{ph}} rangle sim 10$, indicating that substrate surface engineering can potentially reduce the TLS loss below other losses such as quasiparticle and vortex loss.
A strong trend for quantum based technologies and applications follows the avenue of combining different platforms to exploit their complementary technological and functional advantages. Micro and nano-mechanical devices are particularly suitable for hybrid integration due to the easiness of fabrication at multi-scales and their pervasive coupling with electrons and photons. Here, we report on a nanomechanical technological platform where a silicon chip is combined with an aluminum nitride layer. Exploiting the AlN piezoelectricity, Surface Acoustic Waves are injected in the Si layer where the material has been localy patterned and etched to form a suspended nanostring. Characterizing the nanostring vertical displacement induced by the SAW, we found an external excitation peak efficiency in excess of 500 pm/V at 1 GHz mechanical frequency. Exploiting the long term expertise in silicon photonic and electronic devices as well as the SAW robustness and versatility, our technological platform represents a strong candidate for hybrid quantum systems.
Lithium niobate is a multi-functional material with wide reaching applications in acoustics, optics, and electronics. Commercial applications for lithium niobate require high crystalline quality currently limited to bulk and ion sliced material. Thin film lithium niobate is an attractive option for a variety of integrated devices, but the research effort has been stagnant due to poor material quality. Both lattice matched and mismatched lithium niobate are grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) and studied to understand the role of substrate and temperature on nucleation conditions and material quality. Growth on sapphire produces partially coalesced columnar grains with atomically flat plateaus and no twin planes. A symmetric rocking curve shows a narrow linewidth with a full width at half-maximum (FWHM) of 8.6 arcsec (0.0024{deg}) which is comparable to the 5.8 arcsec rocking curve FWHM of the substrate, while the film asymmetric rocking curve is 510 arcsec FWHM. These values indicate that the individual grains are relatively free of long-range disorder detectable by x-ray diffraction (XRD) with minimal measurable tilt and twist and represents the highest structural quality epitaxial material grown on lattice mismatched sapphire without twin planes. Lithium niobate is also grown on lithium tantalate producing high quality coalesced material without twin planes and with a symmetric rocking curve of 193 arcsec, which is nearly equal to the substrate rocking curve of 194 arcsec. The surface morphology of lithium niobate on lithium tantalate is shown to be atomically flat by atomic force microscopy (AFM).