Losses in superconducting planar resonators are presently assumed to predominantly arise from surface-oxide dissipation, due to experimental losses varying with choice of materials. We model and simulate the magnitude of the loss from interface surfaces in the resonator, and investigate the dependence on power, resonator geometry, and dimensions. Surprisingly, the dominant surface loss is found to arise from the metal-substrate and substrate-air interfaces. This result will be useful in guiding device optimization, even with conventional materials.
@article{arxiv.1107.4698,
title = {Surface loss simulations of superconducting coplanar waveguide resonators},
author = {J. Wenner and R. Barends and R. C. Bialczak and Yu Chen and J. Kelly and Erik Lucero and Matteo Mariantoni and A. Megrant and P. J. J. O'Malley and D. Sank and A. Vainsencher and H. Wang and T. C. White and Y. Yin and J. Zhao and A. N. Cleland and John M. Martinis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1107.4698},
year = {2011}
}