Kerr non-linearity enhances the response of a graphene Josephson bolometer

Highly sensitive, broadband bolometers are of great interest because of their versatile usage in wide areas starting from dark matter search, radio astronomy, material science, and qubit readouts in cQED experiments. There have been different realizations of bolometers using superconducting thin films, nanowires, quantum dots, and various 2D materials in the recent past. The challenge is to have a single device that combines high sensitivity, broad bandwidth, a fast readout mechanism, and low noise. Here we demonstrate the first usage of a Josephson parametric amplifier (JPA) as a highly sensitive bolometer. Our key finding is the Kerr non-linearity of the JPA boosts the device's sensitivity. When the bolometer is biased in the non-linear regime, it enhances the sideband signals (~100 times), resulting in an order of magnitude improvement in sensitivity compared to the linear regime. In the non-linear biasing of the device, we achieve a NEP~500 aW/sqrt(Hz). Our bolometer offers a fast detection scheme with a thermal time constant of 4.26 us and an intrinsic JPA time constant of 70 ns. Our device's broadband and fast operation are key and new compared to previously studied graphene-based bolometers. In our device, the gate voltage tunability and the possibility of multiplexing combined with the sensitive bolometric performance offer an opportunity for integrated quantum sensor arrays. Our work demonstrates a way forward to enhance the performance of quantum sensors based on 2D materials by leveraging the inherent non-linear response.