Design and Characterisation of Titanium Nitride Subarrays of Kinetic Inductance Detectors for Passive Terahertz Imaging

Dmitry Morozov; Simon M Doyle; Archan Banerjee; Thomas L R Brien; Dilini Hemakumara; Iain G Thayne; Ken Wood; Robert H Hadfield

doi:10.1007/s10909-018-2023-z

Design and Characterisation of Titanium Nitride Subarrays of Kinetic Inductance Detectors for Passive Terahertz Imaging

J Low Temp Phys. 2018;193(3):196-202. doi: 10.1007/s10909-018-2023-z. Epub 2018 Jul 18.

Authors

Dmitry Morozov¹, Simon M Doyle², Archan Banerjee¹, Thomas L R Brien², Dilini Hemakumara¹, Iain G Thayne¹, Ken Wood³, Robert H Hadfield¹

Affiliations

¹ 1School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.
² 2School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK.
³ QMC Instruments, Cardiff, UK.

Abstract

We report on the investigation of titanium nitride (TiN) thin films deposited via atomic layer deposition (ALD) for microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKID). Using our in-house ALD process, we have grown a sequence of TiN thin films (thickness 15, 30, 60 nm). The films have been characterised in terms of superconducting transition temperature $T_{c}$ , sheet resistance $R_{s}$ and microstructure. We have fabricated test resonator structures and characterised them at a temperature of 300 mK. At 350 GHz, we report an optical noise equivalent power ${NEP}_{opt} \approx 2.3 \times 10^{- 15} W / \sqrt{Hz}$ , which is promising for passive terahertz imaging applications.

Keywords: ALD; Kinetic inductance detector; Titanium nitride.