Abstract
We calculate the effects of doping nanostructuration and the patterning of thin films of high-temperature superconductors (HTS) with the aim of optimizing their functionality as sensing materials for resistive transition-edge bolometer devices (TES). We focus, in particular, on spatial variations of the carrier doping into the CuO layers due to oxygen off-stoichiometry, (that induce, in turn, critical temperature variations) and explore following two major cases of such structurations: First, the random nanoscale disorder intrinsically associated to doping levels that do not maximize the superconducting critical temperature; our studies suggest that this first simple structuration already improves some of the bolometric operational parameters with respect to the conventional, nonstructured HTS materials used until now. Secondly, we consider the imposition of regular arrangements of zones with different nominal doping levels (patterning); we find that such regular patterns may improve the bolometer performance even further. We find one design that improves, with respect to nonstructured HTS materials, both the saturation power and the operating temperature width by more than one order of magnitude. It also almost doubles the response of the sensor to radiation.
Highlights
Bolometers are radiation sensors that detect incident energy via the increase of the temperature T caused by the absorption of incoming photons [1–16]
We organize our studies of the structured high-temperature superconductors (HTS) materials in two parts: First we study the simplest case of carrier doping nanostructuring, namely the random nanoscale structuration that appears by just using oxygen stoichiometries that do not maximize Tc
In the reminder of this article, we describe the results of applying our methods to different structured HTS materials
Summary
Bolometers are radiation sensors that detect incident energy via the increase of the temperature T caused by the absorption of incoming photons [1–16]. This is the case mainly when using conventional low-temperature superconductors with Tc ≤ 1 K (the so-called low-Tc TES bolometers), that achieve TCR ∼ 1000 K−1 or even more [17–19], making them a technology of choice for detecting the most faint radiations, as the cosmic infrared background or in quantum entanglement and cryptography applications [17–19] Note that for these measurements the very low temperature required to operate the low-Tc TES is often not seen as a major problem, because cryogenizing the sensor below a few Kelvin is required anyway in order to minimize the thermal noise coming from the bolometer itself. The requirement of a highly-stabilized liquid-helium-based cryogenics is a serious difficulty for adoption of low-Tc TES in other applications
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