A novel superconducting delay line is presented, it is formed from a coplanar transmission line, the transmission line has a meander structure, which is then curled into a double spiral to maximise the use of the substrate area. Full-wave simulations are conducted on a 0.5 m coplanar line of this type and also a conventional double-spiral line for comparison. Geometric factors limiting the achievable bandwidth are addressed. To extract the device delay and loss without incurring the problems of the input and output connections, AC coupled measurements are done using a 25 ns delay line as a resonator. Quality factors of the resonances from 20 MHz to 20 GHz are measured. The estimated group delay of the delay line is given.
A novel superconducting delay line is presented, it is formed from a coplanar transmission line, the transmission line has a meander structure, which is then curled into a double spiral to maximise the use of the substrate area. Full-wave simulations are conducted on a 0.5 m coplanar line of this type and also a conventional double-spiral line for comparison. Geometric factors limiting the achievable bandwidth are addressed. To extract the device delay and loss without incurring the problems of the input and output connections, AC coupled measurements are done using a 25 ns delay line as a resonator. Quality factors of the resonances from 20 MHz to 20 GHz are measured. The estimated group delay of the delay line is given.
The authors report on the design, simulation, fabrication, and measurement of very long superconducting coplanar waveguide delay lines on 3-in-diameter LaAlO/sub 3/ substrates. Variations of the design involving the addition of a ground plane on the backside of the substrate and for the use of gold wire-bond bridges to electrically connect the in-plane ground planes were investigated. A delay of 45 ns was measured for a line length of 4.3 m. The best response was obtained with wire-bond connections and no backside ground plane. A resonance-free insertion loss of less than 0.01 dB/ns was obtained with a 1.7-GHz bandwidth for NbN at 4.2 K. This is to be compared with a loss of 0.1 dB/ns for a 50-ns 0.141-in OD. (outer diameter) copper coaxial delay line that weighs 1.5 lb and 0.02 dB/ns for a 60-ns 1-in OD copper coaxial delay line that weighs 45 lb.>
This paper reports the design, fabrication, and measurements of optically tunable superconducting microwave resonators and delay lines. The devices are comprised of superconducting coplanar waveguide (CPW) transmission lines fabricated from a 100 nm-thick YBCO film, interrupted by 3- and 5-m YBCO meander structures of the same thickness on top of an LAO substrate. The CPW is tested at 77 K up to a frequency of 50 GHz, where it exhibits a transmission loss of about 0.12 dB/mm. The measurements are done in a cryogenic microwave probe station, where all the calibrations have been performed at 77 K. It has been observed that the resonance frequencies of the superconducting resonators can be changed by more than 2 GHz under the optical illumination at a wavelength of 1550 nm. The delay lines also exhibit a phase retardation of up to 90 at the same operating conditions.
The use of a transmission line resonator offers the possibility for different sensor readout methods, e.g. flux qubit and kinetic inductance detectors. Both cases require a high quality factor, Q L , of the cavity circuit to detect small deviations in the resonance frequency. Various superconducting niobium coplanar waveguide resonators of λ/4 and λ/2 wavelength for 3 and 6 GHz were developed. Different layouts for the coplanar resonators were designed, simulated and measured on common silicon and sapphire substrates at 4.2 K. We found a very good agreement between simulation and measurement results, with Q L between 10 4 and 10 5 at helium temperatures. The presented results show the dependences on the chosen cross section geometries, the coupling factor and the complex layout of the transmission line.
In this paper, we present a novel design of a compact, double-fold half-wave superconducting coplanar waveguide resonator, specifically optimized for quantum readout. The geometry offers advantages in terms of scalability and allows for a more compact integration of qubits per unit area. The superconducting resonators are designed to operate within a fundamental frequency range of 1.9 GHz$-1.95GHz,utilizingbothgapandfingercouplingschemes.Thedevicesarefabricatedusingthinaluminumfilmsdepositedonhigh−resistivitysapphiresubstrates.Theproposedresonatorsexhibitqualityfactor(Q_{L})of2.9× 10^{5}$and 1.58 ×103for gap coupled and finger coupled, respectively, during experimental measurements. The simulated QLof single-folded meander line resonators are found to be 4.65 ×105and 258.42, for gap coupled and finger coupled, respectively, for comparison purpose at similar operating frequency. A comprehensive analysis of the microwave transmission spectra was conducted at cryogenic temperatures near 10 mK, across very high input drive powers ($-30dBmto-10dBm).Experimentalresultsshowagoodagreementwithsimulationsandtheequivalentlumpedcircuitmodel.Notably,theproposeddesignreducesthephysicalfootprintoftheresonatordevicesupto28.2\%comparedtoconventionalsingle−foldmeanderedstructures.TheresonatorsdemonstratestrongpotentialforintegratingqubitswithreadoutandcontrolbusesinquantuminformationprocessingwhichrequireaQ_{L}$between104−105. They also being well-suited for cryogenic detector applications that utilize microwave kinetic inductance detector (MKID) arrays in frequency multiplexing for different coupling schemes.
In this master's thesis, I present the design, fabrication, and characterisation of superconducting microwave resonators. These resonators are quarter-wavelength coplanar waveguide resonators, operating at resonance frequencies between 4 GHz and 8 GHz. This kind of resonator is a key component in several applications, ranging from quantum computation devices to parametric amplifiers. Minimising the losses (achieving high internal quality factors) in these resonators is important to maximise performance of the applications they are used for. During the thesis work, we have studied several possible changes to improve the resonator quality.\n\nFabrication of the resonators was done in the Nanofabrication Laboratory at Chalmers University of Technology, and consist of the following steps: cleaning a sapphire or silicon wafer, depositing a layer of superconducting niobium, photolithography, and etching the waveguide. We then measured the resonators in a cryogen-free dilution refrigerator, at a temperature of 10 mK. The measurements consisted of a power sweep, in order to quantify the quality factor at high and low excitation powers. As an example, the first resonator we fabricated had a quality factor of 4.3 x 10^4 at high power (about 10^5 photons in the resonator), and quality factor of 3.7 x 10^4 at the single-photon level.\n\nWe then investigated different loss mechanisms that we expect to negatively affect the quality factor, and how to reduce this loss. Firstly, to reduce radiation losses and magnetic vortex losses, we reduced the lateral dimensions of the resonator. Secondly, as two-level system (TLS) losses are believed to mainly reside at the surfaces of the materials and interfaces between them, we etched into the substrate to selectively move a part of the TLS away from the resonator. We also studied the effect of the meandering of the resonator on the quality factor, as well as using two different etching gasses.\n\nBy gathering all this data, we were then able to compare the different combinations to see the effect of the changing parameters. In conclusion, the reduced lateral dimensions and the removal of part of the substrate indeed reduce the losses, as expected from the theory. We also found interesting behaviour with regards to the meandering, namely that having a meandered structure negatively affects the quality factor.\n\nCombining all results, we can give a guideline for the fabrication of resonators in the future, which gave us a quality factor up to 4.9 x 10^5 at high excitation power, and 3.0 x 10^5 at the single photon level.
We successfully designed and fabricated an absorption-type of superconducting coplanar waveguide (CPW) resonators. The resonators are made from a niobium film (about 160 nm thick) on a high-resistance Si substrate, and each resonator is fabricated as a meandered quarter-wavelength transmission line (one end is short to the ground and another end is capacitively coupled to a through feedline). With a vector network analyzer we measured the transmissions of the applied microwave through the resonators at ultra-low temperature. The obtained loaded quality factors are significantly high, i.e. up to ∼10 6 . When the temperature increases slowly from the base temperature (20 mK), the resonance frequencies of the resonators are blue shifted and the quality factors are lowered slightly. In principle, this type of device can integrate a series of CPW resonators with a common feedline, making it a promising candidate as the data bus for coupling distant solid-state qubits and the sensitive detector of single photons.