Fabrication and surface treatment of electron-beam evaporated niobium for low-loss coplanar waveguide resonators

We characterize low-loss electron-beam evaporated niobium thin films deposited under ultra-high vacuum conditions. Slow deposition yields films with a high superconducting transition temperature (9.20±0.06 K) as well as a residual resistivity ratio of 4.8. We fabricate the films into coplanar waveguide resonators to extract the intrinsic loss due to the presence of two-level-system fluctuators using microwave measurements. For a coplanar waveguide resonator gap of 2 μm, the films exhibit filling-factor-adjusted two-level-system loss tangents as low as 1.5×10⁻⁷ with single-photon regime internal quality factors in excess of one million after removing native surface oxides of the niobium.