Transmission properties of cryogenic twisted pair filters

We fabricated a cryogenic low pass filter that consists of twisted pairs of manganin wires wrapped in copper tape and measured its transmission characteristics at frequencies up to 18 GHz. The dependence of the microwave transmission characteristics on the filter length was studied, which showed that a filter of length 1.0 m had a 70-dB attenuation at 1 GHz. We also studied the dependence of common- and differential-mode transmission on the number of twists per unit length and found that the number of twists per unit length affects differential-mode transmission but not common-mode transmission. Because the shielded twisted pair filter is more compact than a conventional copper powder filter, it can solve the space and thermal load issues when many cables are required for precision electronic transport experiments at low temperatures.