2021/10/12 by Mohammad Reza Ghatreh Samani, Samani, Mohammad, C. P. Scheller +19
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #FOS: Physical sciences #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #Superconducting and THz Device Technology
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2110.06293
openalex publication_date 2021/10/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Access to lower temperatures has consistently enabled scientific breakthroughs. Pushing the limits of on-chip temperatures deep into the microkelvin regime would open the door to unprecedented quantum coherence, novel quantum states of matter, and also the discovery of unexpected phenomena. Adiabatic demagnetization is the workhorse of microkelvin cooling, requiring a dilution refrigerator precooling stage. Pulse-tube dilution refrigerators have grown enormously in popularity due to their vast experimental space and independence of helium, but their unavoidable vibrations are making microkelvin cooling very difficult. On-chip thermometry in this unexplored territory is also not a trivial task due to extreme sensitivity to noise. Here, we present a pulse-tube compatible microkelvin sample holder with on-board cooling and microwave filtering and introduce a new type of temperature sensor, the gate Coulomb blockade thermometer (gCBT), working deep into the microkelvin regime. Using on- and off-chip cooling, we demonstrate electronic temperatures as low as 224±7μK, remaining below 300μK for 27 hours, thus providing sufficient time for measurements. Finally, we give an outlook for cooling below 50μK for a new generation of microkelvin transport experiments.