Krypton-sputtered tantalum films for scalable high-performance quantum devices

  1. Maciej W. Olszewski,
  2. Lingda Kong,
  3. Simon Reinhardt,
  4. Daniel Tong,
  5. Xinyi Du,
  6. Gabriele Di Gianluca,
  7. Haoran Lu,
  8. Saswata Roy,
  9. Luojia Zhang,
  10. Aleksandra B. Biedron,
  11. David A. Muller,
  12. and Valla Fatemi
Superconducting qubits based on tantalum (Ta) thin films have demonstrated the highest-performing microwave resonators and qubits. This makes Ta an attractive material for superconducting
quantum computing applications, but, so far, direct deposition has largely relied on high substrate temperatures exceeding \SI{400}{\celsius} to achieve the body-centered cubic phase, BCC (\textalpha-Ta). This leads to compatibility issues for scalable fabrication leveraging standard semiconductor fabrication lines. Here, we show that changing the sputter gas from argon (Ar) to krypton (Kr) promotes BCC Ta synthesis on silicon (Si) at temperatures as low as \SI{200}{\celsius}, providing a wide process window compatible with back-end-of-the-line fabrication standards. Furthermore, we find these films to have substantially higher electronic conductivity, consistent with clean-limit superconductivity. We validated the microwave performance through coplanar waveguide resonator measurements, finding that films deposited at \SI{250}{\celsius} and \SI{350}{\celsius} exhibit a tight performance distribution at the state of the art. Higher temperature-grown films exhibit higher losses, in correlation with the degree of Ta/Si intermixing revealed by cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy. Finally, with these films, we demonstrate transmon qubits with a relatively compact, \SI{20}{\micro\meter} capacitor gap, achieving a median quality factor up to 14 million.

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

  1. Maciej W. Olszewski,
  2. Jadrien T. Paustian,
  3. Tathagata Banerjee,
  4. Haoran Lu,
  5. Jorge L. Ramirez,
  6. Nhi Nguyen,
  7. Kiichi Okubo,
  8. Rohit Pant,
  9. Aleksandra B. Biedron,
  10. Daniel C. Ralph,
  11. Christopher J. K. Richardson,
  12. Gregory D. Fuchs,
  13. Corey Rae H McRae,
  14. Ivan V. Pechenezhskiy,
  15. B. L. T. Plourde,
  16. and Valla Fatemi
Magnetic impurities are known to degrade superconductivity. For this reason, physical vapor deposition chambers that have previously been used for magnetic materials have generally
been avoided for making high-quality superconducting resonator devices. In this article, we show by example that such chambers can be used: with Nb films sputtered in a chamber that continues to be used for magnetic materials, we demonstrate compact (3 {\mu}m gap) coplanar waveguide resonators with low-power internal quality factors near one million. We achieve this using a resist strip bath with no post-fabrication acid treatment, which results in performance comparable to previous strip baths with acid treatments. We also find evidence that this improved resist strip bath provides a better surface chemical template for post-fabrication hydrogen fluoride processing. These results are consistent across three Si substrate preparation methods, including a \SI{700}{\celsius} anneal.