Photonic wire bonds and facet-attached micro-lenses are 3D freeform structures that enable high design flexibility while maintaining low loss, reproducibility, high reliability and packaging compatibility. These attributes are crucial for high-volume production of compact optical integration platforms in advanced photonics packaging.

We demonstrate frequency-agile self-injection-locked lasers that exploit photonic wire bonds for connecting piezo-tunable Si 3 N 4 microresonators to DFB lasers. Our devices offer intrinsic linewidths below 100Hz along with highly linear frequency sweeping over more than 1GHz.

We demonstrate solid-state optical phased arrays exploiting 3D-printed facet-attached freeform elements for shaping and deflection of an edge-emitted beam to a surface-normal direction. The concept opens an attractive alternative to widely used grating structures.

We demonstrate an optical phased-array equipped with a 3D-printed facet-attached element for shaping and deflection of the emitted beam. The beam shaper combines freeform refractive surfaces with total-internal-reflection mirrors and is in-situ printed to edge-emitting waveguide facets using high-resolution multi-photon lithography, thereby ensuring precise alignment with respect to on-chip waveguide structures. In a proof-of-concept experiment, we achieve a grating-lobe free steering range of ±30∘ and a full-width-half-maximum beam divergence of approximately 2∘. The concept opens an attractive alternative to currently used grating structures and is applicable to a wide range of integration platforms.

Three-dimensional (3D) nano-printing of freeform optical waveguides, also referred to as photonic wire bonding, allows for efficient coupling between photonic chips and can greatly simplify optical system assembly. As a key advantage, the shape and the trajectory of photonic wire bonds can be adapted to the mode-field profiles and the positions of the chips, thereby offering an attractive alternative to conventional optical assembly techniques that rely on technically complex and costly high-precision alignment. However, while the fundamental advantages of the photonic wire bonding concept have been shown in proof-of-concept experiments, it has so far been unclear whether the technique can also be leveraged for practically relevant use cases with stringent reproducibility and reliability requirements. In this paper, we demonstrate optical communication engines that rely on photonic wire bonding for connecting arrays of silicon photonic modulators to InP lasers and single-mode fibres. In a first experiment, we show an eight-channel transmitter offering an aggregate line rate of 448 Gbit/s by low-complexity intensity modulation. A second experiment is dedicated to a four-channel coherent transmitter, operating at a net data rate of 732.7 Gbit/s - a record for coherent silicon photonic transmitters with co-packaged lasers. Using dedicated test chips, we further demonstrate automated mass production of photonic wire bonds with insertion losses of (0.7 ± 0.15) dB, and we show their resilience in environmental-stability tests and at high optical power. These results might form the basis for simplified assembly of advanced photonic multi-chip systems that combine the distinct advantages of different integration platforms.

We investigate the circuit quantum electrodynamics of anharmonic superconducting nanowire oscillators. The sample circuit consists of a capacitively shunted nanowire with a width of about 20 nm and a varying length up to 350 nm, capacitively coupled to an on-chip resonator. By applying microwave pulses we observe Rabi oscillations, measure coherence times and the anharmonicity of the circuit. Despite the very compact design, simple top-down fabrication and high degree of disorder in the oxidized (granular) aluminum material used, we observe lifetimes in the microsecond range.

Microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) are thin film, cryogenic, superconducting resonators. Incident Cooper pair-breaking radiation increases their kinetic inductance, thereby measurably lowering their resonant frequency. For a given resonant frequency, the highest MKID responsivity is obtained by maximizing the kinetic inductance fraction $\alpha$. However, in circuits with $\alpha$ close to unity, the low supercurrent density reduces the maximum number of readout photons before bifurcation due to self-Kerr non-linearity, therefore setting a bound for the maximum $\alpha$ before the noise equivalent power (NEP) starts to increase. By fabricating granular aluminum MKIDs with different resistivities, we effectively sweep their kinetic inductance from tens to several hundreds of pH per square. We find a NEP minimum in the range of $25\; \text{aW}/\sqrt{\text{Hz}}$ at $\alpha \approx 0.9$, which results from a tradeoff between the onset of non-linearity and a non-monotonic dependence of the noise spectral density vs. resistivity.

Superconducting quantum information processing machines are predominantly based on microwave circuits with relatively low characteristic impedance, of about 100 Ohm, and small anharmonicity, which can limit their coherence and logic gate fidelity. A promising alternative are circuits based on so-called superinductors, with characteristic impedances exceeding the resistance quantum $R_Q = 6.4$ k$\Omega$. However, previous implementations of superinductors, consisting of mesoscopic Josephson junction arrays, can introduce unintended nonlinearity or parasitic resonant modes in the qubit vicinity, degrading its coherence. Here we present a fluxonium qubit design using a granular aluminum (grAl) superinductor strip. Granular aluminum is a particularly attractive material, as it self-assembles into an effective junction array with a remarkably high kinetic inductance, and its fabrication can be in-situ integrated with standard aluminum circuit processing. The measured qubit coherence time $T_2^R$ up to 30 $\mu$s illustrates the potential of grAl for applications ranging from protected qubit designs to quantum limited amplifiers and detectors.

Out of equilibrium quasiparticles (QPs) are one of the main sources of decoherence in superconducting quantum circuits, and are particularly detrimental in devices with high kinetic inductance, such as high impedance resonators, qubits, and detectors. Despite significant progress in the understanding of QP dynamics, pinpointing their origin and decreasing their density remain outstanding tasks. The cyclic process of recombination and generation of QPs implies the exchange of phonons between the superconducting thin film and the underlying substrate. Reducing the number of substrate phonons with frequencies exceeding the spectral gap of the superconductor should result in a reduction of QPs. Indeed, we demonstrate that surrounding high impedance resonators made of granular aluminum (grAl) with lower gapped thin film aluminum islands increases the internal quality factors of the resonators in the single photon regime, suppresses the noise, and reduces the rate of observed QP bursts. The aluminum islands are positioned far enough from the resonators to be electromagnetically decoupled, thus not changing the resonator frequency, nor the loading. We therefore attribute the improvements observed in grAl resonators to phonon trapping at frequencies close to the spectral gap of aluminum, well below the grAl gap.

The demonstration of coherent quantum phase slips (CQPS) in disordered superconductors has opened up a new route towards exploring the fundamental charge–phase duality in superconductors, with the promise of devices with new functionalities and a robust quantum current standard based on CQPS. Here we demonstrate a device that integrates several CQPS junctions: the charge quantum interference device. The charge quantum interference device becomes the dual of the well-known superconducting quantum interference device, and is a manifestation of the Aharonov–Casher effect in a continuous superconducting system devoid of dielectric barriers.

Superconducting high kinetic inductance elements constitute a valuable resource for quantum circuit design and millimeter-wave detection. Granular aluminum (grAl) in the superconducting regime is a particularly interesting material since it has already shown a kinetic inductance in the range of nH/□ and its deposition is compatible with conventional Al/AlOx/Al Josephson junction fabrication. We characterize microwave resonators fabricated from grAl with a room temperature resistivity of 4×10^{3}  μΩ cm, which is a factor of 3 below the superconductor to insulator transition, showing a kinetic inductance fraction close to unity. The measured internal quality factors are on the order of Q_{i}=10^{5} in the single photon regime, and we demonstrate that nonequilibrium quasiparticles (QPs) constitute the dominant loss mechanism. We extract QP relaxation times in the range of 1 s and we observe QP bursts every ∼20  s. The current level of coherence of grAl resonators makes them attractive for integration in quantum devices, while it also evidences the need to reduce the density of nonequilibrium QPs.

We investigate thin films of conducting aluminium-oxide, also known as granular aluminium, as a material for superconducting high quality, high kinetic inductance circuits. The films are deposited by an optimised reactive DC magnetron sputter process and characterised using microwave measurement techniques at milli-Kelvin temperatures. We show that, by precise control of the reactive sputter conditions, a high room temperature sheet resistance and therefore high kinetic inductance at low temperatures can be obtained. For a coplanar waveguide resonator with 1.5 kΩ sheet resistance and a kinetic inductance fraction close to unity, we measure a quality factor in the order of 700 000 at 20 mK. Furthermore, we observe a sheet resistance reduction by gentle heat treatment in air. This behaviour is exploited to study the kinetic inductance change using the microwave response of a coplanar wave guide resonator. We find the correlation between the kinetic inductance and the sheet resistance to be in good agreement with theoretical expectations.

This thesis is set in the framework of superconducting transmon-type qubit architectures with special focus on two important types of coupling between qubits and harmonic resonators: transverse and longitudinal coupling. We will see that longitudinal coupling offers some remarkable advantages with respect to scalability and readout. This thesis will focus on a design, which combines both these coupling types in a single circuit and provides the possibility to choose between pure transverse and pure longitudinal or have both at the same time. We will start with an introduction to circuit quantization, where we will explain how to describe and analyze superconducting electrical circuits in a systematic way and discuss which characteristic circuit elements make up qubits and resonators. We will then introduce the two types of coupling between qubit and resonator which are provided in our design. Translating this discussion from the Hamiltonian level to the language of circuit quantization, we will show how to design circuits with specifically tailored couplings. We will focus on our circuit design that consists of an inductively shunted transmon qubit with tunable coupling to an embedded harmonic mode. The distinctive feature of the tunable design is that the transverse coupling disappears when the longitudinal is maximal and vice versa. Subsequently, we will turn to the implementation of our circuit design, discuss how to choose the parameters, and present an adapted alternative circuit, where coupling strength and anharmonicity scale better than in the original circuit. In addition, we present a proposal for an experimental device that will serve as a prototype for a first experiment. We will conclude the thesis discussing different possibilities to do readout with our circuit design, including a short discussion of the influence of dissipation.