Titanium Nitride Film on Sapphire Substrate with Low Dielectric Loss for Superconducting Qubits

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that a titanium nitride film on sapphire substrate exhibits low dielectric loss and enables superconducting qubits with lifetimes up to 300 microseconds and quality factors near 8 million, advancing qubit coherence.

Contribution

It introduces a TiN film on sapphire substrate with optimized interface properties, achieving high-coherence superconducting qubits with significantly improved lifetimes.

Findings

TiN film on sapphire has low dielectric loss at the interface.

Achieved qubit lifetimes up to 300 microseconds.

Qubit quality factors approach 8 million.

Abstract

Dielectric loss is one of the major decoherence sources of superconducting qubits. Contemporary high-coherence superconducting qubits are formed by material systems mostly consisting of superconducting films on substrate with low dielectric loss, where the loss mainly originates from the surfaces and interfaces. Among the multiple candidates for material systems, a combination of titanium nitride (TiN) film and sapphire substrate has good potential because of its chemical stability against oxidization, and high quality at interfaces. In this work, we report a TiN film deposited onto sapphire substrate achieving low dielectric loss at the material interface. Through the systematic characterizations of a series of transmon qubits fabricated with identical batches of TiN base layers, but different geometries of qubit shunting capacitors with various participation ratios of the material interface, we quantitatively extract the loss tangent value at the substrate-metal interface smaller than $8.9 \times 10^{-4}$ in 1-nm disordered layer. By optimizing the interface participation ratio of the transmon qubit, we reproducibly achieve qubit lifetimes of up to 300 $\mu$s and quality factors approaching 8 million. We demonstrate that TiN film on sapphire substrate is an ideal material system for high-coherence superconducting qubits. Our analyses further suggest that the interface dielectric loss around the Josephson junction part of the circuit could be the dominant limitation of lifetimes for state-of-the-art transmon qubits.