Cavity and ground effects on a superconducting microstrip resonator

Superconducting planar-transmission-line resonators play an increasingly important role in applications such as astronomical detection and circuit quantum electrodynamics. When measuring the transmission response of an array of resonators, however, one often observes some spurious resonances besides the intrinsic ones. In this letter, the effect of the cavity accommodating a half-wavelength superconducting microstrip resonator is investigated. An attenuation pole associated with the intrinsic resonance of the half-wavelength resonator is clearly observed and found to be resulted from the mutual coupling between the microstrip resonator and the cavity. In addition, it is demonstrated that adding a superconducting ground layer for such a microstrip resonator can avoid the frequency shift owing to an ever-present thin air gap between the microstrip resonator and the cavity and can also improve the Q factor of the microstrip resonator.