Impact of the cooling technique on the voltage stability in thin supercoducting microbridges

Cooling efficiency and thermal stability is strictly demanding for practical applications of superconductors operating at current values close to the critical current, such as superconducting detectors. Indeed, a thermally unstable device can show premature quench, i.e. it can suddenly switch from the superconducting state to the normal one at a current value lower than the expected one, which can result in false counts. Cooling by direct contact with a liquid He bath is considered the best way to obtain thermal stability in a superconducting device. Other, cheaper cooling techniques can be suitable to achieve satisfactory working conditions. In this work, we evaluate the impact of three different cooling environments, namely liquid He in a standard cryostat and both dynamic and static He gas in a cryogen-free cryostat, on current voltage characteristics (CVCs) acquired in ultra-thin superconducting microbridges suitable for detectors. In particular, we use the Flux-Flow Instability phenomenon as a tool to analyze voltage stability in CVCs in the three different environments and we find that cryogen-free techniques have performance comparable to liquid He cooling.