Gate-driven Switching Dynamics in a Fully Suspended Superconducting Nanowire

Abstract: A gate voltage can suppress the critical current of a superconducting nanowire, and various scenarios have been proposed to describe these observations. The key difficulty is that these scenarios, including both leakage-driven and field-driven mechanisms, are impossible to disentangle in standard experiments. Here, we resolve this issue by studying a fully suspended superconducting nanowire of amorphous MoGe, separated from the gate by vacuum, eliminating all leakage-driven channels. We measure the phase slip escape rate $Γ$ and find a large gate-induced enhancement of $Γ$, exponential over six orders of magnitude. Fitting various escape-rate models reveals a strong deviation from simple phase slip models, hinting at a complex interaction between the electrostatic field and the phase slip centers. Surprisingly, $Γ$ is not invariant under reversal of the gate-voltage polarity. Our work establishes a clear and nontrivial connection between gate voltage and $Γ$, guiding future research into the origins of the effect.