Development of microwave superconducting microresonators for neutrino mass measurement in the HOLMES framework

Abstract

The European Research Council has recently funded HOLMES, a project with the aim of performing a calorimetric measurement of the electron neutrino mass measuring the energy released in the electron capture decay of 163Ho. The baseline for HOLMES are microcalorimeters coupled to Transition Edge Sensors (TESs) read out with rf-SQUIDs, for microwave multiplexing purposes. A promising alternative solution is based on superconducting microwave resonators, that have undergone rapid development in the last decade. These detectors, called Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs), are inherently multiplexed in the frequency domain and suitable for even larger-scale pixel arrays, with theoretical high energy resolution and fast response. The aim of our activity is to develop arrays of microresonator detectors for X-ray spectroscopy and suitable for the calorimetric measurement of the energy spectra of 163Ho. Superconductive multilayer films composed by a sequence of pure Titanium and stoichiometric TiN layers show many ideal properties for MKIDs, such as low loss, large sheet resistance, large kinetic inductance, and tunable critical temperature $T_c$. We developed Ti/TiN multilayer microresonators with $T_c$ within the range from 70 mK to 4.5 K and with good uniformity. In this contribution we present the design solutions adopted, the fabrication processes and the characterization results.

References in corpus (7)

• HOLMES - The Electron Capture Decay of 163Ho to Measure the Electron Neutrino Mass with sub-eV sensitivity
• Direct Measurement of the Mass Difference of Ho163 and Dy163 Solves the Q-Value Puzzle for the Neutrino Mass Determination
• The Electron Capture ${}^{163}$Ho Experiment ECHo: an overview
• A Position Sensitive X-ray Spectrophotometer using Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors
• High-resolution gamma-ray spectroscopy with a microwave-multiplexed transition-edge sensor array
• Statistical sensitivity of 163-Ho electron capture neutrino mass experiments
• Giga-z: A 100,000 Object Superconducting Spectrophotometer for LSST Follow-up

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Applications for Microwave Kinetic Induction Detectors in Advanced Instrumentation
• Development of Thermal Kinetic Inductance Detectors suitable for X-ray spectroscopy