Impedance measurements on a fast transition-edge sensor for optical and near-infrared range

Abstract

Impedance measurements of superconducting transition-edge sensors (TESs) are a powerful tool to obtain information about the TES thermal and electrical properties. We apply this technique to a 20 μm × 20 μm Ti/Au TES, suitable for application in the optical and near-infrared range, and extend the measurements up to 250 kHz in order to obtain a complete frequency response in the complex plane. From these measurements we obtain important thermal and electrical device parameters such as heat capacity C, thermal conductance G and effective thermal time constant τeff that will be compared with the corresponding values obtained from noise measurements.