The study, published in Applied Physics Letters and selected as a "Featured" article, addresses a major obstacle: many superconductors, including transition metal nitrides, carbides, and silicides, are hard to pattern into working devices using standard chemistry-based approaches. The researchers showed that physical patterning, specifically low-energy ion beam etching (IBE), offers a viable solution.
To validate the method, the team fabricated quantum devices from niobium, a well-known superconductor, and benchmarked their performance against state-of-the-art devices produced through conventional techniques. The results showed comparable quality, confirming that IBE can produce high-performing superconducting hardware.
"Realizing this promise requires components that can preserve fragile quantum states long enough to perform complex calculations," said project lead Davood Shahrjerdi, professor of electrical and computer engineering at NYU Tandon. "That means building ever more perfect hardware to reduce errors and improve the fault tolerance of quantum systems."
The demonstration expands the range of superconducting materials available for quantum devices. "Fabricating devices with materials-agnostic techniques expands the design space for quantum hardware to under-explored materials, which could catalyze advancements in the scaling of quantum information systems to greater size and functionality," said Dr. Matthew LaHaye, research physicist at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).
Ph.D. students Miguel Manzo-Perez and Moeid Jamalzadeh, co-lead authors, fabricated superconducting resonators at NYU Nanofab, Brooklyn's first academic cleanroom. After fabrication, Booz Allen Hamilton contractors Christopher Nadeau and Man Nguyen tested the devices at AFRL at temperatures near absolute zero. The resonators demonstrated low-loss performance, a critical benchmark for high-quality superconducting hardware.
NYU Nanofab, directed by Shahrjerdi, is equipped for advanced device prototyping and also serves as the fabrication arm of the Northeast Regional Defense Technology Hub (NORDTECH), supporting transitions from research to real-world applications in superconducting quantum technologies.
Research Report:Physical patterning of high-Q superconducting niobium resonators via ion beam etching
Related Links
NYU Tandon School of Engineering
Understanding Time and Space
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