High-quality and field resilient microwave resonators on Ge quantum well heterostructures

Abstract

Superconducting resonators integrated with germanium (Ge) quantum wells (QWs) offer a promising platform for hybrid quantum devices. Yet, in the most common heterostructure architectures, they have so far been limited by sizable photon losses. Here, we report the fabrication and characterization of microwave resonators patterned in the aluminum (Al) thin film of an in-situ grown superconductor/semiconductor hybrid heterostructure (HS). The semiconductor part of this hybrid HS is grown on a commercial Ge substrate. We consistently achieve internal quality factors Qi > 1000, surpassing previous results on Ge QW heterostructures grown using the concept of a virtual Ge substrate on silicon (Si) substrates. We reach Qi ≈ 49,000 at single-photon occupation and a plateau of Qi ≈ 20,000 at sub-one photon, an order of magnitude larger than any previously reported value of resonators on Ge QW structures at low power. We further characterize the thin Al film forming the resonator, extracting its kinetic inductance and superconducting gap, and studying its magnetic field dependence. Notably, the resonance remains well-defined up to in-plane magnetic fields of 850 mT. A hysteresis emerges in the out-of-plane magnetic field dependence, for both the resonance frequency and the quality factor, indicating an interesting interplay between vortex-and quasiparticle loss mechanisms.