Additive Manufacturing Meets Quantum
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(Left) Additively manufactured Ti-6Al-4V conical resonator. (Right) Temperature dependence of the superconducting microwave surface impedance.
The November issue of Applied Physics Letters features work from LLNL’s Quantum Coherent Device Physics Group that applies the Lab’s expertise in additive manufacturing to advance quantum computing by entering a design space inaccessible to conventional fabrication. This work was the first demonstration of Ti-6Al-4V as a superconducting radio frequency cavity. Such cavities are key components in many quantum computer designs presently being explored.
For this study, the researchers examined the behavior of Ti-6Al-4V at low temperatures (down to 20 millikelvin). They found that this alloy has multiple superconducting transition temperatures as well as a London penetration depth (length scale over which energy is stored in the motion of charge carriers rather than a magnetic field) an order of magnitude larger than any previously known material in quantum computing or sensing. These properties make Ti-6Al-4V a promising material for precision quantum sensors or quantum limited amplification technologies.
This work was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program (SI-16-004).
[E.T. Holland, Y.J. Rosen, N. Materise, N. Woollett, T. Voisin, Y.M. Wang, S.G. Torres, J. Mireles, G. Carosi, and J.L. DuBois, High-kinetic inductance additive manufactured superconducting microwave cavity, Applied Physics Letters 111 (20), 202602 (2017), doi: 10.1063/1.5000241.]
