Ion-induced dynamical change of supercurrent flow in superconducting strip ion detectors with parallel configuration

Abstract

Superconducting strip ion detectors are promising for realizing ideal ion detection in time-of-flight mass spectrometry. To realize large sensitive area for practical use, parallel configurations of superconducting strips are mandatory. In a previous parallel configuration design, however, we have found that a non-negligible number of ion impact events were lost because a large number of output current pulses for single ions were fatally small. An alternative parallel configuration design has solved this critical problem. It has been revealed that ion impact events induce dynamical change of bias current flow among parallel superconducting strips. Furthermore, output current distributions of larger bias current have shown another dynamical phenomenon: multi-strip switching triggered by single ion impact.