Photon-noise limited sensitivity in titanium nitride kinetic inductance detectors

Abstract

We demonstrate photon-noise limited performance at sub-millimeter wavelengths in feedhorn-coupled, microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) made of a TiN/Ti/TiN trilayer superconducting film, tuned to have a transition temperature of 1.4~K. Micro-machining of the silicon-on-insulator wafer backside creates a quarter-wavelength backshort optimized for efficient coupling at 250~\micron. Using frequency read out and when viewing a variable temperature blackbody source, we measure device noise consistent with photon noise when the incident optical power is $>$~0.5~pW, corresponding to noise equivalent powers $>$~3$\times 10^{-17}$ W/$\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$. This sensitivity makes these devices suitable for broadband photometric applications at these wavelengths.

References in corpus (8)

• Number fluctuations of sparse quasiparticles in a superconductor
• The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope: BLAST
• Crosstalk Reduction for Superconducting Microwave Resonator Arrays
• The Next Generation BLAST Experiment
• MKID development for SuperSpec: an on-chip, mm-wave, filter-bank spectrometer
• Horn-Coupled, Commercially-Fabricated Aluminum Lumped-Element Kinetic Inductance Detectors for Millimeter Wavelengths
• Status of MUSIC, the MUltiwavelength Sub/millimeter Inductance Camera
• MAKO: a pathfinder instrument for on-sky demonstration of low-cost 350 micron imaging arrays

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Anomalous response of superconducting titanium nitride resonators to terahertz radiation
• The non-equilibrium response of a superconductor to pair-breaking radiation measured over a broad frequency band
• Instrumental performance and results from testing of the BLAST-TNG receiver, submillimeter optics, and MKID arrays
• Cryogenic LED pixel-to-frequency mapper for kinetic inductance detector arrays
• Development of dual-polarization LEKIDs for CMB observations
• Characterization of MKIDs for CMB observation at 220 GHz with the South Pole Telescope
• Study of quasi-particle dynamics using the optical pulse response of asuperconducting resonator