Engineering Commons^™

Co-Planar Waveguides For Microwave Atom Chips, Morgan Logsdon

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis describes research to develop co-planar waveguides (CPW) for coupling microwaves from mm-scale coaxial cables into 50 μm-scale microstrip transmission lines of a microwave atom chip. This new atom chip confines and manipulates atoms using spin-specific microwave AC Zeeman potentials and is particularly well suited for trapped atom interferometry. The coaxial-to-microstrip coupler scheme uses a focused CPW (FCPW) that shrinks the microwave field mode while maintaining a constant 50 Ω impedance for optimal power coupling. The FCPW development includes the simulation, design, fabrication, and testing of multiple CPW and microstrip prototypes using aluminum nitride substrates. Notably, the FCPW approach …