Mechanically-intermixed indium superconducting connections for microwave quantum interconnects

TL;DR

This paper introduces mechanically-intermixed indium joins for aluminum superconducting coaxial cables, achieving high quality factors and low contact resistance, enabling low-loss quantum interconnects for superconducting quantum processors.

Contribution

It presents novel mechanically-intermixed indium joining techniques for superconducting cables, characterized by an ABCD matrix model to evaluate contact resistance and quality factors at microwave frequencies.

Findings

Achieved high internal quality factors ($Q_i$) up to 1.55 million in aluminum cables.

Measured low contact resistance ($R_{cont}$) around 6x10^{-4} Ω for indium joins.

Demonstrated reliable cable-to-chip connections with high $Q_i$ and low loss.

Abstract

Superconducting coaxial cables represent critical communication channels for interconnecting superconducting quantum processors. Here, we report mechanically-intermixed indium joins to aluminum coaxial cables for low loss quantum interconnects. We describe an ABCD matrix formalism to characterize the total resonator internal quality factor ($Q_i$) and any contact ($R_{cont}$) or shunt resistance ($R_{shunt}$) associated with the mechanically-intermixed indium joins. We present four resonator test systems incorporating three indium join methods over the typical frequency range of interest (3-5.5GHz) at temperatures below $20mK$. We measure high internal quality factor aluminum cables ($Q_i = 1.55 \pm 0.37 x 10^6$) through a push-to-connect indium join of the outer conductor that capacitively couples the inner conductor for reflection measurements. We then characterize the total internal quality factors of modes of a cable resonator with a push-to-connect superconducting cable-splice at the midpoint to find mean $Q_i = 1.40 x 10^6$ and $Q_i = 9.39 x 10^5$ for even and odd-modes respectively and use an ABCD matrix model of the system to extract $R_{cont} = 6x10^{-4} \Omega$ for the indium join of the inner conductor. Finally, we demonstrate indium press-mold cable-to-chip connections where the cable-to-chip join is placed at a current node and voltage node through varying on-chip waveguide lengths with mean $Q_i = 1.24 x 10^6$ and $Q_i = 1.07 x 10^6$ respectively to extract $R_{cont} = 8.5x10^{-4} \Omega$ and $R_{shunt} = 1.3x10^7 \Omega$ for the interface. With these techniques, we demonstrate a set of low-loss methods to join superconducting cables for future quantum