  Significant progress has been made in the development of superconducting
quantum circuits, however new quantum devices that have longer decoherence
times at higher temperatures are urgently required for quantum technologies.
Superconducting nanowires with quantum phase slips are promising candidates for
use in novel devices that operate on quantum principles. Here, we demonstrate
ultra-thin YBa2Cu3O7-x nanowires with phase-slip dynamics and study their
switching-current statistics at temperatures below 20 K. We apply theoretical
models that were developed for Josephson junctions and show that our results
provide strong evidence for energy-level quantization in the nanowires. The
crossover temperature to the quantum regime is 12-13 K, while the lifetime in
the excited state exceeds 20 ms at 5.4 K. Both values are at least one order of
magnitude higher than those in conventional Josephson junctions based on
low-temperature superconductors. We also show how the absorption of a single
photon changes the phase-slip and quantum state of a nanowire, which is
important for the development of single-photon detectors with high operating
temperature and superior temporal resolution. Our findings pave the way for a
new class of superconducting nanowire devices for quantum sensing and
computing.
