Measurements and Simulations of Athermal Phonon Transmission from Silicon Absorbers to Aluminum Sensors

Phonon reflection and transmission at the interfaces plays a fundamental role in cryogenic particle detectors, in which the optimization of the phonon signal at the sensor (in case of phonon-mediated detectors) or the minimization of the heat transmission (when the detection occurs in the sensor itself) is of primary importance to improve sensitivity. Nevertheless, the mechanisms governing the phonon physics at the interfaces are still not completely understood. The two more successful models, the acoustic mismatch model (AMM) and diffuse mismatch model (DMM) are not able to explain all the accumulated experimental data and the measurement of the transmission coefficients between the materials remains a challenge. Here, we use measurements of the athermal phonon flux in aluminum kinetic inductance detectors (KIDs) deposited on silicon substrates following a particle interaction to validate a Monte Carlo (MC) phonon simulation. We apply the Mattis-Bardeen theory to derive the phonon pulse energy and timing from the KID signal and compare the results with the MC for specular AMM and DMM reflection, finding a remarkably good agreement for specular, while diffuse reflection is clearly disfavored. For an aluminum film of 60 nm and a silicon substrate of 380μm, we obtain transmission coefficients Si-Al in the range 0.3-0.55 and Si-Teflon in the range 0.1-0.15.