High-Temperature Superconducting Multi-Band Radio-Frequency Metamaterial Atoms

TL;DR

This paper presents a micro-fabricated high-temperature superconducting metamaterial atom operating at ~53MHz with high quality factors up to 70K, demonstrating tunability and substrate effects in a compact planar spiral resonator.

Contribution

It introduces a novel HTS metamaterial atom with ultra-small dimensions and high Q factors, operating at low frequencies and variable temperatures, with experimental analysis of substrate influence.

Findings

Achieved Q factors up to 1000 at 70K

Operated at a frequency as low as 53MHz

Demonstrated substrate effects on device performance

Abstract

We report development and measurement of a micro-fabricated compact high-temperature superconducting (HTS) metamaterial atom operating at a frequency as low as $\sim$ 53MHz. The device is a planar spiral resonator patterned out of a {YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_{7-\delta}$} (YBCO) thin film with the characteristic dimension of $\sim \lambda_0/1000$, where $\lambda_0$ is the free-space wavelength of the fundamental resonance. While deployment of an HTS material enables higher operating temperatures and greater tunability, it has not compromised the quality of our spiral metamaterial atom and a Q as high as $\sim 1000$ for the fundamental mode, and $\sim 30000$ for higher order modes, are achieved up to 70K. Moreover, we have experimentally studied the effect of the substrate by comparing the performance of similar devices on different substrates.