High quality three-dimensional aluminum microwave cavities

Journal article, 2020

We present a comprehensive study of internal quality factors in superconducting stub-geometry three-dimensional cavities made of aluminum. We use wet etching, annealing, and electrochemical polishing to improve the as machined quality factor. We find that the dominant loss channel is split between the two-level system loss and an unknown source with a 40:60 proportion. A total of 17 cavities of different purity, resonance frequency, and size were studied. Our treatment results in reproducible cavities, with 10 of them showing internal quality factors above 80 x 10(6) at a power corresponding to an average of a single photon in the cavity. The best cavity has an internal quality factor of 115 x 10(6) at a single photon level. (C) 2020 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).