Development of Lumped Element Kinetic Inductance Detectors for the W-Band

TL;DR

This paper reports the development and optimization of Lumped Element Kinetic Inductance Detectors (LEKIDs) for W-band astronomical observations, focusing on material selection and characterization to achieve full W-band coverage.

Contribution

It introduces a Ti-Al bi-layer design enabling LEKID operation across the entire W-band, improving detector suitability for ground-based CMB and mm-wave astronomy.

Findings

Aluminum film thickness affects the minimum operational frequency.

Pure Aluminum LEKIDs are suboptimal for full W-band coverage.

Ti-Al bi-layer achieves lower critical temperature and full W-band operation.

Abstract

We are developing a Lumped Element Kinetic Inductance Detector (LEKID) array able to operate in the W-band (75-110 GHz) in order to perform ground-based Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and mm-wave astronomical observations. The W-band is close to optimal in terms of contamination of the CMB from Galactic synchrotron, free-free, and thermal interstellar dust. In this band, the atmosphere has very good transparency, allowing interesting ground-based observations with large (>30 m) telescopes, achieving high angular resolution (<0.4 arcmin). In this work we describe the startup measurements devoted to the optimization of a W-band camera/spectrometer prototype for large aperture telescopes like the 64 m SRT (Sardinia Radio Telescope). In the process of selecting the best superconducting film for the LEKID, we characterized a 40 nm thick Aluminum 2-pixel array. We measured the minimum frequency able to break CPs (i.e. $h\nu=2\Delta\left(T_{c}\right)=3.5k_{B}T_{c}$) obtaining $\nu=95.5$ GHz, that corresponds to a critical temperature of 1.31 K. This is not suitable to cover the entire W-band. For an 80 nm layer the minimum frequency decreases to 93.2 GHz, which corresponds to a critical temperature of 1.28 K; this value is still suboptimal for W-band operation. Further increase of the Al film thickness results in bad performance of the detector. We have thus considered a Titanium-Aluminum bi-layer (10 nm thick Ti + 25 nm thick Al, already tested in other laboratories), for which we measured a critical temperature of 820 mK and a cut-on frequency of 65 GHz: so this solution allows operation in the entire W-band.