High-Speed, Yttrium-Barium-Copper-Oxygen, Superconducting Bolometers on Polycrystalline Diamond

Excel Superconductor, in cooperation with Dr. H. S. Kwok at SUNY Buffalo, propose an innovative approach to fabricate sensitive, broad--band high--speed bolometric IR detectors on diamond. The low heat capacity of a diamond substrate makes it possible to build sensitive bolometers with a fast response time. No one has yet deposited high quality YBa2Cu307 (YBCO) thin films on diamond because of lattice mismatch, chemical contamination, and differences in thermal contraction. Our approach is to combine two established technologies--diamond on silicon, and YBCO on silicon with a YSZ buffer layer - to create diamond-silicon--YSZ-YBCO multilayers, in which the silicon and YSZ serve as a composite buffer layer. This innovation is a promising approach to developing a bolometer which detects infrared radiation at wavelengths 1--100 microns more sensitively than any other detector operating at or above 77K.