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Inherent stochasticity of superconductor-resistor switching behavior in nanowires
Nayana Shah1, David Pekker, Paul M Goldbart
1Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.
Abstract:
We study the stochastic dynamics of superconductive-resistive switching in hysteretic current-biased superconducting nanowires undergoing phase-slip fluctuations. We evaluate the mean switching time using the master-equation formalism, and hence obtain the distribution of switching currents. We find that as the temperature is reduced this distribution initially broadens; only at lower temperatures does it show the narrowing with cooling naively expected for phase slips that are thermally activated. We also find that although several phase-slip events are generally necessary to induce switching, there is an experimentally accessible regime of temperatures and currents for which just one single phase-slip event is sufficient to induce switching, via the local heating it causes.
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