Fabrication and surface treatment of electron-beam evaporated niobium for low-loss coplanar waveguide resonators

Abstract

We characterize low-loss electron-beam evaporated niobium thin films deposited under ultra-high vacuum conditions. Slow deposition yields films with a high superconducting transition temperature ($9.20\pm 0.06\mathrm{K}$) as well as a residual resistivity ratio of $4.8$. We fabricate the films into coplanar waveguide resonators to extract the intrinsic loss due to the presence of two-level-system fluctuators using microwave measurements. For a coplanar waveguide resonator gap of $2\mu \mathrm{m}$, the films exhibit filling-factor-adjusted two-level-system loss tangents as low as $1.5\times 10^{-7}$ with single-photon regime internal quality factors in excess of one million after removing native surface oxides of the niobium.

5 pages, 3 figures

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• Low-loss Nb on Si superconducting resonators from a dual-use spintronics deposition chamber and with acid-free post-processing