High-Tc superconducting detector for highly-sensitive microwave magnetometry

Abstract

We have fabricated arrays of High-T${}_c$ Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs) with randomly distributed loop sizes as sensitive antennas for Radio-Frequency (RF) waves. These sub-wavelength size devices known as Superconducting Quantum Interference Filters (SQIFs) detect the magnetic component of the electromagnetic field. We use a scalable ion irradiation technique to pattern the circuits and engineer the Josephson junctions needed to make SQUIDs. Here we report on a 300 SQUIDs series array with loops area ranging from $6$ to $60\mu m^2$, folded in a meander line covering a $3.5mm\times 8mm$ substrate area, made out of a $150$-nm-thick ${\mathrm{YBa}}_2{\mathrm{Cu}}_3{\mathrm{O}}_7$ film. Operating at a temperature $T=66K$ in a un-shielded magnetic environment, under low DC bias current ($I=60\mu A$) and DC magnetic field ($B=3\mu T$), this SQIF can detect a magnetic field of a few $pT$ at a frequency of $1.125GHz$, which corresponds to a sensitivity of a few hundreds of $fT/\sqrt{Hz}$, and shows linear response over 7 decades in RF power. This work is a promising approach for the realization of low dissipative sub-wavelength GHz magnetometers.

References in corpus (3)

• An ultra-sensitive and wideband magnetometer based on a superconducting quantum interference device
• Narrow-bandwidth sensing of high-frequency fields with continuous dynamical decoupling
• Novel Regime of Operation for Superconducting Quantum Interference Filters

Cited by in corpus (2)

• The role of kinetic inductance on the performance of YBCO SQUID magnetometers
• A linear magnetic flux-to-voltage transfer function of differential DC SQUID