Thermoelectric Single-Photon Detection Through Superconducting Tunnel Junctions

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? V 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 an operating window of more than 4 decades. Therefore, the TED might find applications in quantum computing, telecommunications, optoelectronics, spectroscopy and astro-particle physics. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.