Analysis of characteristics of Al MKID resonators

TL;DR

This study compares Al MKID resonators made by evaporation and sputtering, analyzing their temperature-dependent properties and revealing effects of magnetic impurities and the Kondo effect on their performance.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of temperature behaviors of Al MKID resonators, highlighting the impact of fabrication methods and impurity scattering effects.

Findings

Evaporated Al resonators' behavior matches Mattis-Bardeen theory.

Sputtered Al resonators show a peak near 0.17 K due to impurities.

Kondo effect explains the temperature dependence in sputtered films.

Abstract

We have prepared two kinds of Al resonators using thin films made by evaporation or sputtering and studied temperature behavior of their quality factors and resonance frequencies with the help of the extended Mattis-Bardeen (M-B) equations and its approximated analytical expressions. We have found that temperature behavior of both the internal quality factor and resonance frequency shift measured in evaporated Al thin-film resonators are well agreed with those calculated by the analytical expressions of the complex conductivity given by the M-B theory. In the Al thin film resonators made by sputtering, the internal quality factor and resonance frequency shift show a peak and a bump near 0.17 K in the respective temperature dependence. It is found that inverse of the internal quality factor is well approximated by a-b*log(T) below 0.15 K, where T is the temperature. This type of temperature dependence strongly indicates the existence of the magnetic impurity scattering of residual quasiparticles due to the Kondo effect. It is shown that temperature dependence of the internal quality factor and resonance frequency shift observed in the sputtered Al resonators can be well fitted by the theory taking the Kondo effect and kinetic inductance of the residual quasiparticles into account.