The current state in a Josephson junction is metastable. Thermal and quantum fluctuations destroy such a state and make its lifetime finite. By lowering the temperature the role of quantum fluctuations increases. If there is a gap in the excitation spectrum, then for quantum tunneling high-frequency processes (pair decay) are essential. Quantum tunneling is connected with a change of a large amount of electron states.
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Larkin et al. (1983) studied this question.
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