Effect of ion irradiation on superconducting thin films

Abstract

We demonstrate ion irradiation by argon or gallium as a wafer-scale post-processing method to increase disorder in superconducting thin films. We study several widely used superconductors, both single-elements and compounds. We show that ion irradiation increases normal-state resistivity in all our films, which is expected to enable tuning their superconducting properties, for example, toward higher kinetic inductance. We observe an increase of superconducting transition temperature for Al and MoSi, and a decrease for Nb, NbN, and TiN. In MoSi, ion irradiation also improves the mixing of the two materials. We demonstrate fabrication of an amorphous and homogeneous film of MoSi with uniform thickness, which is promising, e.g., for superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors.