Role of kinetic inductance in transport properties of shunted superconducting nanowires

Recently, transport measurements have been carried out in resistively shunted long superconducting nanowires (Brenner et al 2012 Phys. Rev. B 85 224507). The measured voltage-current (V-I) characteristics were explained by the appearance of the phase slip centers in the shunted wire, and the whole wire was modeled as a single Josephson junction. The kinetic inductance of the long nanowires used in experiments is generally large. Here we argue that the shunted superconducting nanowire acts as a Josephson junction in series with an inductor. The inductance depends on the length and the cross section of the wire. The inclusion of inductance in our analysis modifies the V-I curves, and increases the rate of switching from the superconducting state to the resistive state. The quantitative differences can be quite large in some practical parameter sets, and might be important to properly understand the experimental results. Our proposed model can be verified experimentally by studying the shunted superconducting nanowires of different lengths and cross sections. © 2013 IOP Publishing Ltd.