High Quality Factor Platinum Silicide Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors

Abstract

We report on the development of Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) using platinum silicide as the sensor material. MKIDs are an emerging superconducting detector technology, capable of measuring the arrival times of single photons to better than two microseconds and their energies to around ten percent. Previously, MKIDs have been fabricated using either sub-stoichiometric titanium nitride or aluminum, but TiN suffers from spatial inhomogeneities in the superconducting critical temperature and Al has a low kinetic inductance fraction, causing low detector sensitivity. To address these issues, we have instead fabricated PtSi microresonators with superconducting critical temperatures of 944$\pm$12~mK and high internal quality factors ($Q_i\gtrsim 10^6$). These devices show typical quasiparticle lifetimes of ${\tau }_{qp}\approx 30$--$40\mu$s and spectral resolution, $R=\lambda /\Delta \lambda$, of 8 at 406.6~nm. We compare PtSi MKIDs to those fabricated with TiN and detail the substantial advantages that PtSi MKIDs have to offer.

arXiv comment5 pages, 5 figures, accepted by APL

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• DARKNESS: A Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector Integral Field Spectrograph for High-Contrast Astronomy
• Interplay between kinetic inductance, non-linearity and quasiparticle dynamics in granular aluminum MKIDs
• Large-format platinum silicide microwave kinetic inductance detectors for optical to near-IR astronomy
• Design and Performance of Hafnium Optical and Near-IR Kinetic Inductance Detectors
• Cryogenic Scintillation Properties of n-Type GaAs for the Direct Detection of MeV/c2 Dark Matter
• Characterization of sputtered hafnium thin films for high quality factor microwave kinetic inductance detectors
• Superconducting MoSi nanowires
• Strong Charge-Photon Coupling in Planar Germanium Enabled by Granular Aluminium Superinductors
• Investigation of Optical Coupling in Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors using Superconducting Reflective Plates
• Nonlinear kinetic inductance sensor
• A Scalable Cryogenic LED Module for Selectively Illuminating Kinetic Inductance Detector Arrays