Thermoelectric single-photon detection through superconducting tunnel junctions
Abstract
Bipolar thermoelectricity in tunnel junctions between superconductors of different energy gap has been recently predicted and experimentally demonstrated. This effect showed thermovoltages up to 150\;μV at milliKelvin temperatures. Thus, superconducting tunnel junctions can be exploited to realize a passive single-photon thermoelectric detector TED operating in the broadband range 15 GHz - 50 PHz. In particular, this detector is expected to show a signal-to-noise ratio of about 15 down to =50 GHz and a operating window of more than 4 decades. Therefore, the TED might find applications in quantum computing, telecommunications, optoelectronics, spectroscopy and astro-particle physics.
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