MULTILAYERED JOSEPHSON TRANSMISSION-LINE BASED PHOTON-COUNTING DETECTOR WITH ULTRA-HIGH TEMPORAL AND HIGH-SPATIAL-RESOLUTION

A superconducting Josephson transmission line (JTL) fabricated with mu ltilayered tunnel junctions with thin (approximately 100 angstrom) sup erconducting layers may be used as an ionizing radiation detector. The suppression of the superconducting energy gap in the layers of such a JTL, due to the local deposition of energy by incident radiation, wil l initiate the propagation of one or more fluxons in the device. These fluxons represent digital information in the form processable by sing le flux quantum (SFQ) superconducting digital circuitry. Designs for J TL based detectors with temporal resolutions on the order of picosecon ds and spatial resolution on the order of microns, along with numerica l simulation results, are presented.