Characterization of low-loss hydrogenated amorphous silicon films for superconducting resonators

Abstract

Superconducting resonators used in millimeter-submillimeter astronomy would greatly benefit from deposited dielectrics with a small dielectric loss. We deposited hydrogenated amorphous silicon films using plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition, at substrate temperatures of 100°C, 250°C and 350°C. The measured void volume fraction, hydrogen content, microstructure parameter, and bond-angle disorder are negatively correlated with the substrate temperature. All three films have a loss tangent below $10^{-5}$ for a resonator energy of $10^5$ photons, at 120 mK and 4-7 GHz. This makes these films promising for microwave kinetic inductance detectors and on-chip millimeter-submilimeter filters.

Presented at the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2020. Full published paper, poster and video available at https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2562233

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Hydrogenated Amorphous Silicon Carbide: A Low-loss Deposited Dielectric for Microwave to Submillimeter Wave Superconducting Circuits
• Large format imaging spectrograph for the Large Submillimeter Telescope (LST)
• Vibrational modes as the origin of dielectric loss at 0.27$\unicode{x2013}$100 THz in a-SiC:H
• Low-loss Si-based Dielectrics for High Frequency Components of Superconducting Detectors