Fabrication of rhenium Josephson junctions

Rhenium is a superconductor with a relatively weak tendency to oxidize, which is advantageous in superconducting quantum circuit and qubit applications. In this work, Re/Al-AlO_x/Re Josephson tunnel junctions were fabricated using a selective film-etching process similar to that developed in Nb trilayer technology. The Re films had a superconducting transition temperature of 4.8 K and a transition width of 0.2 K. The junctions were found to be highly reproducible using the fabrication process and their characteristics had good quality with a low leakage current and showed a superconducting gap of 0.55 meV.