Photon-activated electron hopping in a single-electron trap enhanced by Josephson radiation

Abstract

Using a Josephson junction interferometer (DC SQUID) as a microwave source for irradiating a single-electron trap, both devices fabricated on the same chip, we study the process of photon-assisted tunneling as an effective mechanism of single photon detection. High sensitivity down to a very small oscillation amplitude $v_{\mathrm{J}}\sim$ 10 nV$\ll E_{\mathrm{act}}\lesssim h{f}_{\mathrm{J}}$ and down to low photon absorption rates ${\Gamma }_{\mathrm{ph}}\sim$ (1--50)Hz, as well as a clear threshold type of operation with an activation energy $E_{\mathrm{act}}\sim$ 400 $\mu$eV, are demonstrated for the trap with respect to the microwave photons of frequency $f_{\mathrm{J}}\sim$ (100--200)GHz. Tunable generation is demonstrated with respect to the power and frequency of the microwave signal produced by the SQUID source biased within the subgap voltage range. A much weaker effect is observed at the higher junction voltages along the quasiparticle branch of the $I-V$ curve; this response mostly appears due to the recombination phonons.

4 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Loss and decoherence due to stray infrared light in superconducting quantum circuits
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• High Frequency Quantum Admittance and Noise Measurement with an On-chip Resonant Circuit
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Cited by in corpus (2)

• 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