High Quality Stepped-Impedance Resonators Suitable for Circuit-QED Measurement of Superconducting Artificial Atoms

High quality factor coplanar resonators are critical elements in superconducting quantum circuits. We describe the design, fabrication and measurement of stepped impedance resonators (SIRs), which are more compact in size than commonly used uniform impedance resonators (UIRs). With properly chosen impedance ratio, SIRs can be 27% shorter than UIRs. As a result, the area occupied by SIRs can be reduced. Two kinds of designs containing both SIRs and UIRs are fabricated and measured. The power dependence of the extracted internal quality factors (Qi) for all the resonators showed that SIRs and UIRs have comparable performance with Qi around half-million under single-photon level excitation. These results indicate that SIRs could be used in superconducting quantum circuits. The reduced size of SIRs may also lead to reduced overall circuit area and increased integration level.