Nanostripes of hybrid superconductor/ferromagnetic (S/F) NbN/NiCu bilayers and pure superconducting NbN nanostripes have been investigated in dark count experiments. Presence of a ferromagnetic layer influences the superconducting properties of the S/F bilayer, such as the critical current density and the transient photoresponse. The observed significant decrease of the dark-count rate is discussed in terms of vortex-related fluctuation models to shed more light in the intriguing question of the basic mechanism responsible for dark counts in superconducting nanostripe single photon detectors.

Date Published: 6 May 2015
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 9504, Photon Counting Applications 2015, 950404 (6 May 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2179672

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9504:
Photon Counting Applications 2015
Ivan Prochazka; Roman Sobolewski; Ralph B. James, Editor(s)