%0 Generic
%T Dark counts initiated by macroscopic quantum tunneling in NbN superconducting photon detectors
%A Murphy, A.
%A Semenov, A.
%A Korneev, A.
%A Korneeva, Y.
%A Gol’tsman, G.
%A Bezryadin, A.
%D 2014
%F Murphy_etal2014
%O exported from refbase (https://db.rplab.ru/refbase/show.php?record=1356), last updated on Thu, 13 May 2021 00:29:41 -0500
%X We perform measurements of the switching current distributions of three w = 120 nm wide, 4 nm thick NbN superconducting strips which are used for single-photon detectors. These strips are much wider than the diameter 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.
%K NbN SSPD
%9 miscellaneous
%U https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.7689v2