Titanium Nitride Film on Sapphire Substrate with Low Dielectric Loss for Superconducting Qubits

Abstract

Dielectric loss is one of the major decoherence sources of superconducting qubits. Contemporary high-coherence superconducting qubits are formed by material systems mostly consisting of superconducting films on substrate with low dielectric loss, where the loss mainly originates from the surfaces and interfaces. Among the multiple candidates for material systems, a combination of titanium nitride ($\mathrm{Ti}\mathrm{N}$) film and sapphire substrate has good potential because of its chemical stability against oxidization and its high quality at interfaces. In this work, we report a $\mathrm{Ti}\mathrm{N}$ film deposited onto sapphire substrate achieving low dielectric loss at the material interface. Through the systematic characterizations of a series of transmon qubits fabricated with identical batches of $\mathrm{Ti}\mathrm{N}$ base layers but different geometries of qubit shunting capacitors with various participation ratios of the material interface, we quantitatively extract the loss-tangent value at the substrate-metal interface, which is smaller than $8.9\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}4}$ in a 1-nm disordered layer, and a limiting quality factor of about 7.3 million. By optimizing the interface participation ratio of the two-dimensional (2D) transmon qubit, we reproducibly achieve a quality factor of 5.7 million on average. The best 2D qubits show lifetimes of up to $300\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{s}$ and quality factors achieving 8.1 million. We demonstrate that $\mathrm{Ti}\mathrm{N}$ film on sapphire substrate is an ideal material system for high-coherence superconducting qubits. Our analyses further suggest that the interface dielectric loss around the Josephson-junction part of the circuit could be the dominant limitation of lifetimes for state-of-the-art transmon qubits.