Superconductive radiation detectors: challenges and some recent achievements

The interest of superconductor materials for the realization of radiation detectors lies in a variety of concrete achievements and stimulating proposals. In this paper, recent aspects of superconductive radiation detectors are reviewed wich refer to two important issues. The former deals with results concerning detectors based on superconductive junctions in a configuration which provide both energy and time discrimination of single photons. The latter concerns materials and device aspects of hot-electron photodetectors based on nanosized heterostructured superconducting strips. Both aspects offer a new potential in the field of radiation detection.