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 the 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 the PtSi microresonators with the superconducting critical temperatures of 944 ± 12 mK and high internal quality factors (Qi≳106). These devices show typical quasiparticle lifetimes of τqp≈30–40 μs and spectral resolution, R=λ/Δλ, 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.