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.

Effect of substrate miscut angle on critical thickness, structural and electronic properties of MBE-grown NbN films on c-plane sapphire

  1. Anand Ithepalli,
  2. Saumya Vashishtha,
  3. Naomi Pieczulewski,
  4. Qiao Liu,
  5. Amit Rohan Rajapurohita,
  6. Matthew Barone,
  7. Darrell Schlom,
  8. David A. Muller,
  9. Huili Grace Xing,
  10. and Debdeep Jena
We report the structural and electronic properties of niobium nitride (NbN) thin films grown by molecular beam epitaxy on c-plane sapphire with miscut angles of 0.5o, 2o, 4o, and 10o
towards m-axis. X-ray diffraction (XRD) scans reveal that the full width at half maximum of the rocking curves around the 1 1 1 reflection of these NbN films decreases with increasing miscut. Starting from 76 arcsecs on 0.5o miscut, the FWHM reduces to almost 20 arcsecs on 10o miscut sapphire indicating improved structural quality. Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) images indicate that NbN on c-sapphire has around 10 nm critical thickness, irrespective of the substrate miscut, above which it turns columnar. The improved structural property is correlated with a marginal increment in superconducting transition temperature Tc from 12.1 K for NbN on 0.5o miscut sapphire to 12.5 K for NbN on 10o miscut sapphire.