Compact inductor-capacitor resonators at sub-gigahertz frequencies

Compact inductor-capacitor (LC) resonators, in contrast to coplanar waveguide (CPW) resonators, have a simple lumped-element circuit representation but usually call for sophisticated finite-element method (FEM) simulations for an accurate modeling. Here we present a simple analytical model for a family of coplanar LC resonators where the electrical properties are directly obtained from the circuit geometry with a satisfying accuracy. Our experimental results on ten high-internal-quality-factor resonators (Qi≳2×105), with frequencies ranging from 300MHz to 1GHz, show an excellent consistency with both the derived analytical model and detailed FEM simulations. These results showcase the ability to design sub-gigahertz resonators with less than 2% deviation in the resonance frequency, which has immediate applications, for example, in the implementation of ultrasensitive cryogenic detectors. The achieved compact resonator size of the order of a square millimeter indicates a feasible way to integrate hundreds of microwave resonators on a single chip for realizing photonic lattices.