Development of Thermal Kinetic Inductance Detectors suitable for X-ray spectroscopy

TL;DR

This paper reports on the development of Thermal Kinetic Inductance Detectors (TKIDs) for X-ray spectroscopy, aiming to create high-resolution, multiplexed calorimeters with a scalable array for advanced spectrometry.

Contribution

It introduces a novel thermal mode operation for MKIDs, enabling X-ray photon detection with high energy resolution and multiplexing capabilities in a scalable detector array.

Findings

Successful fabrication of Ti/TiN microresonators

Design and simulation of detector components completed

Progress towards a 1000-pixel X-ray spectrometer demonstrator

Abstract

We report on the development of Thermal Kinetic Inductance Detectors (TKIDs) suitable to perform X-ray spectroscopy measurements. The aim is to implement MKIDs sensors working in thermal quasi-equilibrium mode to detect X-ray photons as pure calorimeters. The thermal mode is a variation on the MKID classical way of operation that has generated interest in recent years. TKIDs can offer the MKIDs inherent multiplexibility in the frequency domain, a high spatial resolution comparable with CCDs, and an energy resolution theoretically limited only by thermodynamic fluctuations across the thermal weak links. Microresonators are built in Ti/TiN multilayer technology with the inductive part thermally coupled with a metal absorber on a suspended SiN membrane, to avoid escape of phonons from the film to the substrate. The mid-term goal is to optimize the single pixel design in term of superconducting critical temperatures, internal quality factors, kinetic inductance and spectral energy resolution. The final goal is to realize a demonstrator array for a next generation thousand pixels X-ray spectrometer. In this contribution, the status of the project after one year of developments is reported, with detailed reference to the microresonators design and simulations and to the fabrication process.