Superconducting Filterbanks Enhance Millimeter-Wave Spectroscopy

The paper presents a high-efficiency, high-resolution on-chip filterbank spectrometer designed for line intensity mapping and broadband wave-like dark matter searches. Existing superconducting filterbank architectures face limitations due to a 50% inherent efficiency limit and sensitivity to thin-film dielectric loss. The new design addresses these bottlenecks by eliminating the termination resistor and employing niobium-on-silicon coplanar waveguide resonant structures for the filterbanks. Sonnet electromagnetic simulations of a 10-channel device around 90 GHz demonstrate >74% per channel efficiency and a resolving power of R=1211±105. Sensitivity analyses confirm the design's robustness against typical fabrication uncertainties, with the exception of dielectric thickness. This technology offers a scalable solution for the next generation of millimeter-wave spectroscopic experiments, enhancing sensitivity for detecting faint cosmic signals and improving the precision of dark matter mass mapping. The spectrometer maximizes sensitivity to the faint, aggregate cosmic signal for line intensity mapping while providing redshift precision necessary to resolve the clustering of large-scale structure. For broadband dark matter searches, it partitions broadband signals into narrow frequency bins that directly correspond to dark matter masses, allowing signal frequency to be mapped with high precision to the particle's mass.

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