Commercially Available Capacitors at Cryogenic Temperatures

Commercially available capacitors are not specified for operation at 77 K or 4 K, and some devices showed a dramatic decrease of capacitance at cryogenic temperature. Furthermore, for voltage biasing of cryogenic low impedance sensors it is very important to know parasitic resistance. In this case, the parasitic Equivalent Series Resistance (ESR) of the capacitor used for the AC-biasing is a bottleneck of the voltage biasing. Involved in TES development and SQUID multiplexing, we have characterized the capacitance and the ESR values of some commercially available capacitors at 77 K and 4 K