Electromagnetic-field-induced decay of currents in thin-film superconducting rings with photons emission

Abstract

It is shown that currents in thin-film superconducting rings irradiated by coherent microwave fields, can discretely decay with photons emission. These quantized jumps of the supercurrent correspond to destruction one or several magnetic flux quanta trapped in the ring. The ring thickness should be less than the skin-depth of the low-frequency field. The probability of the microwave field-induced single-photon decay of the supercurrent states in these rings is obtained. The angle distributions of the photons emitted by superconducting rings, and the current state lifetimes, depending on the ring sizes and the fluxoid numbers in the initial states, are studied.