Temperature-Sensitive Porous Thin-Films for Superconducting Transition-Edge Sensors

Superconducting transition-edge sensor (TES) is one of the sensitive single-photon detectors and possesses the photon-number resolving ability. Almost all of the existing sensitive radiation thermal absorption thin films for the generation of TESs are usually generated by optimizing the material components of the films. Alternatively, in this paper we experimentally demonstrated a flexible and controllable approach to generate the temperature-sensitive superconducting one-component thin film, by using the laser drilling technique. Specifically, we designed the sample by numerical simulation method, fabricated the aluminum (Al) thin film with the optimized pore parameters, and experimentally measured the temperature-dependent resistances in ultra-low thermal noise environments. The measured results indicate that, the resistances of the fabricated porous Al films are highly temperature-sensitive around their superconducting transition-edge regimes, and thus they can be utilized to make the desired TES devices. Although the work temperature of the prepared \(\mu\)-Mux readout circuit does not match the generated TES configuration at present, we argue that the one-component porous films, demonstrated here, may provide an effective approach to make the desired TES device for the experimental implementation of infrared single-photon detection.