High-temperature growth of ultra thin NbTiN films on lithium niobate for integrated single photon detection

Abstract

Lithium niobate-on-insulator (LNOI) is an emerging photonic platform with high potential for scalable quantum information processing due to its strong second-order nonlinearity. However, little progress has been made in developing on-chip single-photon detectors on LNOI. Niobium titanium nitride (NbTiN) superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) are a promising candidate for this application. In this work, we use DC reactive magnetron sputtering to grow high-quality NbTiN thin films using an ultra-high vacuum deposition system with a base pressure lower than $2\times 10^{-10}$ mbar. Enabled by the low concentration of background impurities in this system, we investigate the impact of substrate temperature during NbTiN growth. We achieve four nm thick superconducting films with a critical temperature ($T_{c}$) of 12.3 K grown at a substrate temperature of 825 K. We find that the NbTiN films grow in the (111) orientation and evolve from a porous pillar structure when grown at low temperatures to densely packed fibrous grains at higher temperatures. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the increased substrate temperature reduces the oxygen concentration in our films and improves the overall stoichiometry. In addition, we integrate these films with the LNOI platform and investigate the obtained interface quality. Lastly, we fabricate SNSPDs from the NbTiN film on LNOI and characterize the detector performance.