Anomalous Behavior of High Quality Factor Planar Superconducting Resonators*

Superconducting coplanar waveguide resonators have proven to be invaluable tools in studying some of the decoherence mechanisms found in superconducting qubits. Surface two-level states tend to dominate decoherence at temperatures below ~ Tc/10 and at very low microwave powers, assuming loss through other channels (e.g. quasiparticles, vortices, and radiation loss) has been mitigated through proper shielding and design. I will present recent measurements of resonators whose behavior diverges significantly from the standard two-level state model at low temperatures and low excitation energies, resulting in startling behavior of the internal quality factor.