Exploring Fabrication and Measurement of Superconducting Kinetic Inductance Devices

Detection and measurement of weak microwave signals is essential to the fields of radio astronomy and quantum computing. In the field of radio astronomy, measurements of weak microwave signals of the Cosmic Microwave Background reveal fundamental aspects of our universe such as composition and geometry. In quantum computing applications, computation is performed on the readout of the weak microwave signals from qubits. Superconducting materials exhibit no dc resistance and typically low loss below the gap frequency, making superconducting devices low dissipation and attractive for detection and measurement of weak microwave signals. This work focuses on the fabrication and measurement of superconducting microwave resonators to support the development of the µ-Spec spectrometer employing integrated superconducting photon-counting kinetic inductance detectors for the EXperiment for Cryogenic Large-aperture Intensity Mapping (EXCLAIM) balloon mission in collaboration with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and a superconducting travelling wave kinetic inductance parametric amplifier in collaboration with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.