Fabrication and Characterization of Aluminum Airbridges for Superconducting Qubit Circuits

Superconducting circuits based on coplanar waveguides (CPWs) are susceptible to parasitic slotline modes which can lead to loss and decoherence. We motivate the use of superconducting airbridges as a reliable method for preventing the propagation of these modes. We describe the fabrication of these airbridges on superconducting resonators, which we use to measure the loss due to placing airbridges over CPW lines. We find that the additional loss at single photon levels is small, and decreases at higher drive powers. These results pave the way for building airbridge crossovers on more complex qubit circuits.