Development of Semi-Rigid Superconducting Coaxial Cables as Low-Pass Filters

We developed thin semi-rigid coaxial cables for use as readout noise filters in low temperature experiments. The cables reported here had an outer diameter of 0.86 mm, and consisted of a standard cupronickel (CuNi) alloy as a seamless outer conductor and polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) as a dielectric material. The inner conductor was superconducting niobium-titanium (NbTi) covered by a CuNi cladding layer with a thickness of 0, 13, or 38 μm. The thermal conductance and transmission properties for the cables were measured at cryogenic temperatures and compared to those for a conventional CuNi semi-rigid cable. Between 1.4 and 8.4 K, the thermal conductance was similar to that for the conventional cable because the contribution from the cladding was estimated to be small. On the other hand, measured at about 3 K, the attenuation at high frequency up to 10 GHz differed in that the cutoff frequency increased with decreasing CuNi cladding thickness. For a cladding thickness of 38 μm, the 3 dB cutoff frequency for a 1-m-long cable was 100 MHz, whereas for a cladding thickness of 13 μm, it was 500 MHz. This type of semi-rigid cable can, therefore, be used as a low-pass filter whose attenuation characteristics can be tailored by changing the thickness of the cladding layer.