Optical response of Al/Ti bilayer transition edge sensors

Abstract

We report the optical response characteristics of Al/Ti bilayer transition edge sensors (TESs), which are mainly comprised of Al/Ti bilayer thermometers and suspended SiN membranes for thermal isolation. The measurement was performed in a 3He sorption refrigerator and the device's response to optical pulses was investigated using a pulsed laser source. Based on these measurements, we obtained the effective recovery time (τeff) of the devices at different biases and discussed the dependence of τeff on the bias. The device with a 940 μm × 940 μm continuous suspended SiN membrane demonstrated a fast response speed with τeff = 3.9 μs, which indicates a high temperature sensitivity (α = T/R · dR/dT = 326). The results also showed that the TES exhibits good linearity under optical pulses of variable widths.