2006/10/04 by Benjamin A. Mazin, Megan E. Eckart, B. Bumble +7 · 3 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Condensed matter physics #Detector #Inductance #Kinetic energy #Kinetic inductance #Materials science #Microwave #Optics #Photon #Physics #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Quasiparticle #Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit Design #Superconducting and THz Device Technology #Superconductivity #Tantalum #Voltage #astro-ph #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1063/1.2390664
4 pages, 2 figures. Submitted to Applied Physics Letters, August 25, 2006
arxiv created 2006/10/04 · openalex publication_date 2006/11/27 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The surface impedance of a superconductor changes when energy is absorbed and Cooper pairs are broken to produce single electron (quasiparticle) excitations. This change may be sensitively measured using a thin-film resonant circuit called a microwave kinetic inductance detector (MKID). The practical application of MKIDs for photon detection requires a method of efficiently coupling the photon energy to the MKID. The authors present results on position sensitive x-ray detectors made by using two aluminum MKIDs on either side of a tantalum photon absorber strip. Diffusion constants, recombination times, and energy resolution are reported. MKIDs can easily be scaled into large arrays.