We propose the use of superconducting nanowires as both target and sensor for direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter. With excellent sensitivity to small energy deposits on electrons, and demonstrated low dark counts, such devices could be used to probe electron recoils from dark matter scattering and absorption processes. We demonstrate the feasibility of this idea using measurements of an existing fabricated tungsten-silicide nanowire prototype with 0.8-eV energy threshold and 4.3 nanograms with 10 thousand seconds of exposure, which showed no dark counts. The results from this device already place meaningful bounds on dark matter-electron interactions, including the strongest terrestrial bounds on sub-eV dark photon absorption to date. Future expected fabrication on larger scales and with lower thresholds should enable probing new territory in the direct detection landscape, establishing the complementarity of this approach to other existing proposals.

We demonstrate evidence of coherent magnetic flux tunneling through superconducting nanowires patterned in a thin highly disordered NbN film. The phenomenon is revealed as a superposition of flux states in a fully metallic superconducting loop with the nanowire acting as an effective tunnel barrier for the magnetic flux, and reproducibly observed in different wires. The flux superposition achieved in the fully metallic NbN rings proves the universality of the phenomenon previously reported for InO x . We perform microwave spectroscopy and study the tunneling amplitude as a function of the wire width, compare the experimental results with theories, and estimate the parameters for existing theoretical models.

Superconducting properties of three series of amorphous W x Si 1x films with different thickness and stoichiometry were investigated by dc transport measurements in a magnetic field up to 9 T. These amorphous W x Si 1x films were deposited by magnetron cosputtering of the elemental source targets onto silicon substrates at room temperature and patterned in the form of bridges by optical lithography and reactive ion etching. Analysis of the data on magnetoconductivity allowed us to extract the critical temperatures, superconducting coherence lengths, magnetic penetration depths, and diffusion constants of electrons in the normal state as functions of film thickness for each stoichiometry. Two basic time constants were derived from transport and time-resolving measurements. A dynamic process of the formation of a hotspot was analyzed in the framework of a diffusion-based vortex-entry model. We used a two-stage diffusion approach and defined a hotspot size by assuming that the quasiparticles and normal-state electrons have the same diffusion constant. With this definition and these measured material parameters, the hotspot in the 5-nm-thick W 0.85 Si 0.15 film had a diameter of 107 nm at the peak of the number of nonequilibrium quasiparticles. Superconducting properties of three series of amorphous W x Si 1−x films with different thickness and stoichiometry were investigated by dc transport measurements in a magnetic field up to 9 T. These amorphous W x Si 1−x films were deposited by magnetron cosputtering of the elemental source targets onto silicon substrates at room temperature and patterned in the form of bridges by optical lithography and reactive ion etching. Analysis of the data on magnetoconductivity allowed us to extract the critical temperatures, superconducting coherence lengths, magnetic penetration depths, and diffusion constants of electrons in the normal state as functions of film thickness for each stoichiometry. Two basic time constants were derived from transport and time-resolving measurements. A dynamic process of the formation of a hotspot was analyzed in the framework of a diffusion-based vortex-entry model. We used a two-stage diffusion approach and defined a hotspot size by assuming that the quasiparticles and normal-state electrons have the same diffusion constant. With this definition and these measured material parameters, the hotspot in the 5-nm-thick W 0.85 Si 0.15 film had a diameter of 107 nm at the peak of the number of nonequilibrium quasiparticles.

We studied timing jitter in the appearance of photon counts in meandering nanowires with different fractional amount of bends. Timing jitter, which is the probability density of the random time delay between photon absorption in current-carrying superconducting nanowire and appearance of the normal domain, reveals two different underlying physical scenarios. In the deterministic regime, which is realized at large currents and photon energies, jitter is controlled by position dependent detection threshold in straight parts of meanders and decreases with the current. At small photon energies, jitter increases and its current dependence disappears. In this probabilistic regime jitter is controlled by Poisson process in that magnetic vortices jump randomly across the wire in areas adjacent to the bends.

We report on the inelastic-scattering rate of electrons on phonons and relaxation of electron energy studied by means of magnetoconductance, and photoresponse, respectively, in a series of strongly disordered superconducting NbN films. The studied films with thicknesses in the range from 3 to 33 nm are characterized by different Ioffe-Regel parameters but an almost constant product q T l (q T is the wave vector of thermal phonons and l is the elastic mean free path of electrons). In the temperature range 14-30 K, the electron-phonon scattering rates obey temperature dependencies close to the power law 1/τ e-ph ∼ T n with the exponents n ≈ 3.2-3.8. We found that in this temperature range τ e-ph and n of studied films vary weakly with the thickness and square resistance. At 10 K electron-phonon scattering times are in the range 11.9-17.5 ps. The data extracted from magnetoconductance measurements were used to describe the experimental photoresponse with the two-temperature model. For thick films, the photoresponse is reasonably well described without fitting parameters, however, for thinner films, the fit requires a smaller heat capacity of phonons. We attribute this finding to the reduced density of phonon states in thin films at low temperatures. We also show that the estimated Debye temperature in the studied NbN films is noticeably smaller than in bulk material.