Heat hunting in freezer: Direct measurement of quasiparticle diffusion in superconducting nanowire

Abstract

Propagation and relaxation of nonequilibrium quasiparticles in superconductors are of key importance for functioning of numerous nanoscale devices, enabling operation of some of them, and limiting the performance of the others. The quasiparticles heated above lattice temperature may relax locally via phonon or photon emission channels, or diffuse over appreciable distances in a nanostructure altering the functionality of their remote components. Tracing quasiparticles experimentally in real-time domain has remained the challenging task owing to their rapid dynamics. With electronic nanothermometry, based on probing of the temperature-dependent switching current of a superconducting nanobridge, we monitor heat pulse carried by a flux of nonequilibrium quasiparticles as it passes by our detector with a noise-equivalent temperature of $10$mK /$\sqrt{N}$, where $N$ is the number of pulses probing the bridge (typically $N=10000$), and temporal resolution of a single nanosecond. The measurement provides the picture of quasiparticle diffusion in a superconducting aluminum strip and direct determination of the diffusion constant $D$ equal to $100$ cm${}^2$/s with no energy dependence visible.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Microwave response of a metallic superconductor subject to a high-voltage gate electrode
• Heat dissipation mechanisms in hybrid superconductor-semiconductor devices revealed by Joule spectroscopy
• Quantum thermodynamics with a single superconducting vortex
• Probing confined vortices with a superconducting nanobridge
• Stochastic thermal feedback in switching measurements of superconducting nanobridge caused by overheated electrons and phonons