We report our development on design, fabrication and characterization of various superconducting resonators for quantum device applications. The resonators are developed mainly for superconducting qubit implementation in circuit QED structure, but future application will include photon detectors such as microwave kinetic inductance detectors. First we designed and fabricated half-wavelength coplanar waveguide resonators with niobium thin film on a high resistive silicon wafer, with the fundamental frequencies in the range of 1 to 8 GHz. The loaded quality factors are controlled by the coupling capacitors, and the lower bound of the intrinsic quality factor was measured down to 7 mK in the dilution refrigerator. We have also designed quarter-wavelength resonators and lumped LC resonators coupled to a transmission line, and characterized multiple resonators in a single transmission line. For the 3D transmon qubit application, we designed and fabricated a rectangular box resonator with superconducting aluminum. The intrinsic quality factor of the box resonator exceeds three million at 7 mK. We will also present basic results on the integration of a transmon qubit in the superconducting resonator.
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 Q
Lof 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 ($-
30dBmto-
10dBm).Experimentalresultsshowagoodagreementwithsimulationsandtheequivalentlumpedcircuitmodel.Notably,theproposeddesignreducesthephysicalfootprintoftheresonatordevicesupto28.2\%
comparedtoconventionalsingle−foldmeanderedstructures.TheresonatorsdemonstratestrongpotentialforintegratingqubitswithreadoutandcontrolbusesinquantuminformationprocessingwhichrequireaQ_{L}$between
104−105. They also being well-suited for cryogenic detector applications that utilize microwave kinetic inductance detector (MKID) arrays in frequency multiplexing for different coupling schemes.
We address the scaling-up problem for superconducting quantum circuits by using lumped-element resonators based on an alternative fabrication method of aluminum-aluminum oxide-aluminum (Al-
AlOx-Al) parallel-plate capacitors. The size of the resonators is only
0.04mm2, which is more than one order smaller than the typical size of coplanar resonators (
1mm2). The fabrication method we develop easily fits into the standard superconducting qubit fabrication process. We obtain capacitance per area $14\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}\mathrm{fF}/\text{\ensuremath{\mu}}{\mathrm{m}}^{2}$ and the internal quality factor $1\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{3}$--$8\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{3}$ at the single-photon level. Our results show that such devices based on Al-
AlOx-Al capacitors could be further applied to the qubit readout scheme, including resonators, filters, amplifiers, as well as microwave metamaterials and innovative types of qubits, such as $0\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\pi}$ qubit.
I discuss the design, fabrication and measurement at millikelvin-temperatures of Al/AlO
x/Al Josephson junction-based transmon qubits coupled to superconducting thin-film lumped element microwave resonators made of aluminum on sapphire. The resonators had a center frequency of around
6GHz, and a total quality factor ranging from 15,000 to 70,000 for the various devices. The area of the transmon junctions was about
150nm×150nm and with Josephson energy
EJ such that
10GHz≤EJ/h≤30GHz. The charging energy of the transmons arising mostly from the large interdigital shunt capacitance, was
Ec/h≈300MHz. I present microwave spectroscopy of the devices in the strongly dispersive regime of circuit quantum electrodynamics. In this limit the ac Stark shift due to a single photon in the resonator is greater than the linewidth of the qubit transition. When the resonator is driven coherently using a coupler tone, the transmon spectrum reveals individual ``photon number'' peaks, each corresponding to a single additional photon in the resonator. Using a weighted average of the peak heights in the qubit spectrum, I calculated the average number of photons
nˉ in the resonator. I also observed a nonlinear variation of
nˉ with the applied power of the coupler tone
Prf. I studied this nonlinearity using numerical simulations and found good qualitative agreement with data. In the absence of a coherent drive on the resonator, a thermal population of
5.474GHz photons in the resonator, at an effective temperature of
120mK resulted in a weak
n=1 thermal photon peak in the qubit spectrum. In the presence of independent coupler and probe tones, the
n=1 thermal photon peak revealed an Autler-Townes splitting. The observed effect was explained accurately using the four lowest levels of the dispersively dressed Jaynes-Cummings transmon-resonator system, and numerical simulations of the steady-state master equation for the coupled system. I also present time-domain measurements on transmons coupled to lumped-element resonators. From
T1 and Rabi oscillation measurements, I found that my early transmon devices (called design LEv5) had lifetimes (
T1∼1μs) limited by strong coupling to the
50Ω transmission line. This coupling was characterized by the the rate of change of the Rabi oscillation frequency with the change in the drive voltage (
dfRabi/dV) -- also termed the Rabi coupling to the drive. I studied the design of the transmon-resonator system using circuit analysis and microwave simulations with the aim being to reduce the Rabi coupling to the drive. By increasing the resonance frequency of the resonator
ωr/2π from 5.4
GHz to 7.2
GHz, lowering the coupling of the resonator to the transmission line and thereby increasing the external quality factor
Qe from 20,000 to 70,000, and reducing the transmon-resonator coupling
g/2π from 70
MHz to 40
MHz, I reduced the Rabi coupling to the drive by an order of magnitude (
∼ factor of 20). The
T1∼4μs of devices in the new design (LEv6) was longer than that of the early devices, but still much shorter than the lifetimes predicted from Rabi coupling, suggesting the presence of alternative sources of noise causing qubit relaxation. Microwave simulations and circuit analysis in the presence of a dielectric loss tangent
tanδ≃5×10−6 agree reasonably well with the measured
T1 values, suggesting that surface dielectric loss may be causing relaxation of transmons in the new designs.
Recently, a new kind of distributed element superconducting resonators with granular aluminum (grAl) has been developed for circuit quantum electrodynamics. Given that lumped element resonators possess certain advantages over the distributed element ones, in this paper, we use a relatively simple micro-nanotechnology, without the etching process, to fabricate the designed lumped element superconducting grAl resonators. They are deposited on silicon substrates by DC magnetron sputtering of pure Al in an atmosphere of Ar and O2. By cryogenic microwave transmission measurements, at a temperature of 50 mK, we find that, compared with a usual Al resonator of the same size, such a device shows significantly strong nonlinearity and thus higher kinetic inductance. The noise features, quality factors, and temperature-dependence of the resonant frequencies have been investigated experimentally. It is believed that the lumped element superconducting resonators with high kinetic inductance demonstrated here could also be applied to superconducting quantum computation and photon counting in the future.
High quality on-chip microwave resonators have recently found prominent new applications in quantum optics and quantum information processing experiments with superconducting electronic circuits, a field now known as circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED). They are also used as single photon detectors and parametric amplifiers. Here we analyze the physical properties of coplanar waveguide resonators and their relation to the materials properties for use in circuit QED. We have designed and fabricated resonators with fundamental frequencies from 2 to 9 GHz and quality factors ranging from a few hundreds to a several hundred thousands controlled by appropriately designed input and output coupling capacitors. The microwave transmission spectra measured at temperatures of 20 mK are shown to be in good agreement with theoretical lumped element and distributed element transmission matrix models. In particular, the experimentally determined resonance frequencies, quality factors, and insertion losses are fully and consistently explained by the two models for all measured devices. The high level of control and flexibility in design renders these resonators ideal for storing and manipulating quantum electromagnetic fields in integrated superconducting electronic circuits.