A hybrid superconductor-normal metal electron trap as a photon detector

Abstract

A single-electron trap built with two Superconductor (S) - Insulator (I) - Normal (N) metal tunnel junctions and coupled to a readout SINIS-type single-electron transistor A (SET A) was studied in a photon detection regime. As a source of photon irradiation, we used an operating second SINIS-type SET B positioned in the vicinity of the trap. In the experiment, the average hold time of the trap was found to be critically dependent on the voltage across SET B. Starting in a certain voltage range, a photon-assisted electron escape was observed at a rate roughly proportional to the emission rate of the photons with energies exceeding the superconducting gap of S-electrodes in the trap. The discussed mechanism of photon emission and detection is of interest for low-temperature noise spectrometry and it can be of relevance for the ampere standard based on hybrid SINIS turnstiles.

submitted, 3 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Vanishing quasiparticle density in a hybrid Al/Cu/Al single-electron transistor
• Electron Counting Capacitance Standard with an improved five-junction R-pump
• Long hold times in a two-junction electron trap

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Single-electron current sources: towards a refined definition of ampere
• Detecting parity effect in a superconducting device in the presence of parity switches
• Characterising superconducting filters using residual microwave background
• DC measurement of dressed states in a coupled 100~GHz resonator system using a single quasiparticle transistor as a sensitive microwave detector
• Photon-activated electron hopping in a single-electron trap enhanced by Josephson radiation
• Al/AlO${}_{\mathrm{x}}$/Al-Josephson-junction-based microwave generators for weak-signal applications below 100 mK