Crystallinity in Niobium oxides: A pathway to mitigate Two-Level System Defects in Niobium 3D Resonator for quantum applications

Materials imperfections in Nniobium based superconducting quantum circuits, in particular, two-level-system (TLS) defects, are a major source of decoherence, ultimately limiting the performance of quantum computation and sensing. Thus, identifying and understanding the microscopic origin of possible TLS defects in these devices and developing strategies to eliminate them is key to superconducting qubit performance improvement. In this paper, we demonstrate the reduction of two-level system losses in three-dimensional superconducting radio frequency (SRF) niobium resonators by a 10-hour high vacuum (HV) heat treatment at 650°C, even after exposure to air and high pressure rinsing (HPR). By probing the effect of this annealing on niobium samples using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and high-resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), we witness an alteration of the native oxide composition re-grown after air exposure and HPR and the creation of nano-scale crystalline oxide regions, which correlates with the measured tenfold quality factor enhancement at low fields of the 1.3 GHz niobium resonator.