%0 Journal Article
%T Three temperature regimes in superconducting photon detectors: quantum, thermal and multiple phase-slips as generators of dark counts
%A Murphy, A.
%A Semenov, A.
%A Korneev, A.
%A Korneeva, Y.
%A Gol'tsman, G.
%A Bezryadin, A.
%J Sci. Rep.
%D 2015
%V 5
%@ 2045-2322
%F Murphy_etal2015
%O PMID:25988591; PMCID:PMC4437302
%O exported from refbase (https://db.rplab.ru/refbase/show.php?record=1344), last updated on Wed, 12 May 2021 14:15:23 -0500
%X We perform measurements of the switching current distributions of three w approximately 120 nm wide, 4 nm thick NbN superconducting strips which are used for single-photon detectors. These strips are much wider than the diameter of the vortex cores, so they are classified as quasi-two-dimensional (quasi-2D). We discover evidence of macroscopic quantum tunneling by observing the saturation of the standard deviation of the switching distributions at temperatures around 2 K. We analyze our results using the Kurkijarvi-Garg model and find that the escape temperature also saturates at low temperatures, confirming that at sufficiently low temperatures, macroscopic quantum tunneling is possible in quasi-2D strips and can contribute to dark counts observed in single photon detectors. At the highest temperatures the system enters a multiple phase-slip regime. In this range single phase-slips are unable to produce dark counts and the fluctuations in the switching current are reduced.
%K SPD
%K SSPD
%K SNSPD
%R 10.1038/srep10174
%U http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25988591
%U https://doi.org/10.1038/srep10174
%P 10174 (1 to 10)