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arXiv:1706.04172 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Bistability in a mesoscopic Josephson junction array resonator

Phani Raja Muppalla, Oscar Gargiulo, Seyed Iman Mirzaei, B. Prasanna Venkatesh, Mathieu L. Juan, Lukas Grünhaupt, Ioan M. Pop, Gerhard Kirchmair

Published Jan 30, 2018• 31 citations
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Abstract

We present an experimental investigation of stochastic switching of a bistable Josephson junction array resonator with a resonance frequency in the GHz range. As the device is in the regime where the anharmonicity is on the order of the linewidth, the bistability appears for a pump strength of only a few photons. We measure the dynamics of the bistability by continuously observing the jumps between the two metastable states, which occur with a rate ranging from a few Hz down to a few mHz. The switching rate strongly depends on the pump strength, readout strength and the temperature, following Kramers' theory. The interplay between nonlinearity and coupling, in this little explored regime, could provide a new resource for nondemolition measurements, single photon switches, or even elements for autonomous quantum error correction.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.97.024518

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We present an experimental investigation of stochastic switching of a bistable Josephson junction array resonator with a resonance frequency in the GHz range. As the device is in the regime where the anharmonicity is on the order of the linewidth, the bistability appears for a pump strength of only a few photons. We measure the dynamics of the bistability by continuously observing the jumps between the two metastable states, which occur with a rate ranging from a few Hz down to a few mHz. The switching rate strongly depends on the pump strength, readout strength and the temperature, following Kramers' theory. The interplay between nonlinearity and coupling, in this little explored regime, could provide a new resource for nondemolition measurements, single photon switches, or even elements for autonomous quantum error correction.
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Superconducting weak link (WL), acting as a Josephson junction (JJ), is one of the widely used elements in superconductor science and quantum circuits. A hysteretic JJ with robust switching between its superconducting and resistive state is an excellent candidate for single-photon detection. However, the ubiquitous fluctuations in the junction strongly influence the stability of the states and, thus, the transition from one to the other. Here, we present an experimental study of switching statistics of critical and retrapping currents of a JJ based on niobium WL in its hysteretic regime. The mean lifetimes of the two metastable states, namely, the zero-voltage superconducting state and finite-voltage resistive state, are estimated from the distributions. Further, close to the hysteresis crossover temperature, observed telegraphic noise in the time domain due to random switching between the states provides their lifetimes directly. We present a thermal model introducing a double-well (bistable) feature with an intriguing quantity with respect to the devices’ temperature states. The effects of temperature fluctuations on the stability of the states are shown. We discuss our results toward further improvement of the efficiency of superconducting WL or nanowire single-photon detectors.
We report low temperature, microwave transmission measurements on a new switchable and tunable class of nonlinear metamaterials. A wireless two dimensional array of Josephson junctions (JJ) is probed as a metamaterial where each plaquette in the array is considered as a meta-atom. In the presence of microwaves, this compact metamaterial of 30,000 connected meta-atoms synchronizes the flow of Cooper pairs to yield a single robust resonant signal with a quality factor of 2800 at the lowest temperature for our measurements. The transmission signal is switched on and off and its amplitude and frequency are tuned with either temperature, incident rf power or dc magnetic field. Surprisingly, increasing the incident rf power above a threshold causes the resonance to split into multiple discrete resonances that extend over a range of 240 MHz for a wide temperature window. We posit that this effect is a new incarnation of the inverse ac Josephson effect where the Josephson plasma frequency locks to the rf drive frequency generating quantized frequency steps, instead of voltage steps, in the absence of a dc bias.
We have fabricated and measured a high-Q Josephson junction resonator with a tunable resonance frequency. A dc magnetic flux allows the resonance frequency to be changed by over 10%. Weak coupling to the environment allows a quality factor of ~7000 when on average less than one photon is stored in the resonator. At large photon numbers, the nonlinearity of the Josephson junction creates two stable oscillation states. This resonator can be used as a tool for investigating the quality of Josephson junctions in qubits below the single photon limit, and can be used as a microwave qubit readout at high photon numbers.
We investigate a network of coupled superconducting transmission line resonators, each of them made nonlinear with a capacitively shunted Josephson junction coupling to the odd flux modes of the resonator. The resulting eigenmode spectrum shows anticrossings between the plasma mode of the shunted junction and the odd resonator modes. Notably, we find that the combined device can inherit the complete nonlinearity of the junction, allowing for a description as a harmonic oscillator with a Kerr nonlinearity. Using a dc SQUID instead of a single junction, the nonlinearity can be tuned between 10 kHz and 4 MHz while maintaining resonance frequencies of a few gigahertz for realistic device parameters. An array of such nonlinear resonators can be considered a scalable superconducting quantum simulator for a Bose–Hubbard Hamiltonian. The device would be capable of accessing the strongly correlated regime and be particularly well suited for investigating quantum many-body dynamics of interacting particles under the influence of drive and dissipation.
We performed a novel phase-sensitive microwave reflection experiment which directly probes the dynamics of the Josephson plasma resonance in both the linear and the nonlinear regime. When the junction was driven below the plasma frequency into the nonlinear regime, we observed for the first time the transition between two different dynamical states predicted for nonlinear systems. In our experiment, this transition appears as an abrupt change in the reflected signal phase at a critical excitation power. This controlled dynamical switching can form the basis of a sensitive amplifier, in particular, for the readout of superconducting qubits.