Oxide-Nitride Heteroepitaxy for Low-Loss Dielectrics in Superconducting Quantum Circuits

Abstract

Superconducting qubits show great promise for the realization of fault-tolerant quantum computing, but lossy, amorphous dielectrics limit current technology. Identifying highly crystalline and stoichiometric dielectrics with intrinsically low microwave loss is therefore a central materials challenge, yet experimentally validated platforms remain scarce. This work integrates a crystalline dielectric into a heteroepitaxial TiN/γ-Al2O3/TiN trilayer grown via pulsed laser deposition. Correlative high-resolution imaging, diffraction, and spectroscopy measurements confirm the single-crystal quality and chemical integrity of all layers, with minimal defects and limited anion interdiffusion across the oxide–nitride interfaces. Using microwave lumped-element resonators with parallel-plate capacitors, this work establishes an experimentally measured upper bound for the dielectric loss of epitaxial γ-Al2O3, which has a low intrinsic two-level system loss of δTLS0 = (2.8 ± 0.1) × 10–5. These results establish heteroepitaxial oxides on transition metal nitrides as an attractive materials platform for superconducting quantum circuits, particularly for integration into compact device architectures such as merged-element transmons and microwave kinetic inductance detectors.