Asymmetric voltage noise in superconducting tunnel junctions with electromagnetic environment

We investigate theoretically the V-I characteristics and voltage noise of superconducting tunnel junctions with small critical current via the matrix-continued-fraction method. Special attention is paid to the large hysteresis in the V-I characteristics and to the voltage-noise anomaly observed in preliminary experiments. The current dependence of the voltage noise shows a strong asymmetry between the forward and backward current ramping and a discontinuous change of the noise close to its measured maximum occurring at the switching current. We show that both the large hysteresis and the voltage noise anomaly in this current-biased setup are a consequence of the influence of junction's electromagnetic environment. Typically, the voltage-noise dependence on the junction current parametrized by the external drive contains a loop which is, however, not observed experimentally because of the implementation of the junction-current ramp. Skipping a part of the loop is responsible for the observed hysteresis as well as the noise anomaly.