Fast electron thermometry towards ultra-sensitive calorimetric detection

Abstract

We demonstrate radiofrequency thermometry on a micrometer-sized metallic island below 100 mK. Our device is based on a normal metal-insulator-superconductor tunnel junction coupled to a resonator with transmission readout. In the first generation of the device, we achieve 90 {\mu}K/Hz^1/2 noise-equivalent temperature with 10 MHz bandwidth. We measure the thermal relaxation time of the electron gas in the island, which we find to be of the order of 100 {\mu}s. Such a calorimetric detector, upon optimization, can be seamlessly integrated into superconducting circuits, with immediate applications in quantum-thermodynamics experiments down to single quanta of energy.