Nanobolometer with ultralow noise equivalent power

Roope Kokkoniemi,Janne Lehtinen,Antti Lamminen,Olli-Pentti Saira,Juha Hassel,Leif Grönberg,Visa Vesterinen,Slawomir Simbierowicz,Mikko Möttönen,Russell E Lake,Mika Prunnila,Kuan Y Tan,Joonas Govenius,András M Gunyhó

doi:10.1038/s42005-019-0225-6

Abstract

Since the introduction of bolometers more than a century ago, they have been used in various applications ranging from chemical sensors, consumer electronics, and security to particle physics and astronomy. However, faster bolometers with lower noise are of great interest from the fundamental point of view and to find new use-cases for this versatile concept. We demonstrate a nanobolometer that exhibits roughly an order of magnitude lower noise equivalent power, 20,{mathrm{zW}}/sqrt {{mathrm{Hz}}}, than previously reported for any bolometer. Importantly, it is more than an order of magnitude faster than other low-noise bolometers, with a time constant of 30 μs at 60,{mathrm{zW}}/sqrt {{mathrm{Hz}}}. These results suggest a calorimetric energy resolution of 0.3 zJ = h × 0.4 THz with a time constant of 30 μs. Further development of this nanobolometer may render it a promising candidate for future applications requiring extremely low noise and high speed such as those in quantum technology and terahertz photon counting.

Highlights

Since the introduction of bolometers more than a century ago, they have been used in various applications ranging from chemical sensors, consumer electronics, and security to particle physics and astronomy
Future development of the method and qubits may bring a relief on the speed (≲1 μs time constant) and energy resolution (≲100 yJ) requirements realized by Opremcak et al.[17], this potential application calls for improvements on the state-of-the-art fast ultralow-noise bolometers
Promising noise equivalent power (NEP) have been reported in the terahertz range for alternative device concepptsffiffi,ffiffiffiffisuch as kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs) ð400 zW= HzÞ33 and proof-opf-pffiffiffirffiiffiffinciple quantum-capacitance detectors[34,35]

Summary

Introduction

Since the introduction of bolometers more than a century ago, they have been used in various applications ranging from chemical sensors, consumer electronics, and security to particle physics and astronomy. Microwave bolometers have recently emerged as a potential candidate for the detection element in the dark matter experiments[23,24,25], where the bolometer could either be used to directly measure the extremely low powers arising from photons generated in axion haloscopes[26] or they could be applied to detect dark matter-generated quasiparticles that diffuse into the bolometer In the former case, the advantage of bolometers over microwave amplifiers is that they are resilient to quantum fluctuations, but further development in the bolometer noise level is needed to achieve reasonable integration times in the experiments. Promising NEPs have been reported in the terahertz range for alternative device concepptsffiffi,ffiffiffiffisuch as kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs) ð400 zW= HzÞ33 and proof-opf-pffiffiffirffiiffiffinciple quantum-capacitance detectors (of order 10 zW= Hz)[34,35] Both of these detect radiation-generated non-equilibrium quasiparticles in a superconductor. The coupling efficiency to a radiation source is expected to be low and full experimental characterization of the efficiency has not been reported

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Conclusion