Recent experiments on Josephson junction arrays (JJAs) in microwave cavities have opened up a new avenue for investigating the properties of these devices while minimizing the amount of external noise coming from the measurement apparatus itself. These experiments have already shown promise for probing many-body quantum effects in JJAs. In this work, we develop a general theoretical description of such experiments by deriving a quantum phase model for planar JJAs containing quantized vortices. The dynamical susceptibility of this model is calculated for some simple circuits, and signatures of the injection of additional vortices are identified. The effects of decoherence are considered via a Lindblad master equation.
Recent experiments on Josephson junction arrays (JJAs) in microwave cavities have opened up a new avenue for investigating the properties of these devices while minimizing the amount of external noise coming from the measurement apparatus itself. These experiments have already shown promise for probing many-body quantum effects in JJAs. In this work, we develop a general theoretical description of such experiments by deriving a quantum phase model for planar JJAs containing quantized vortices. The dynamical susceptibility of this model is calculated for some simple circuits, and signatures of the injection of additional vortices are identified. The effects of decoherence are considered via a Lindblad master equation.
Josephson junction arrays (JJAs) are engineered many-body quantum systems consisting of several superconducting islands connected by thin tunnel barriers - Josephson junctions (JJs). They are of interest both from a fundamental point of view (e.g. addressing questions of macroscopic quantum physics, providing model systems in which to study complex many-body phenomena) and from the prospect of technological applications (e.g. quantum computing, metrology, metamaterials). In this thesis we present various tools and techniques for the theoretical study of JJAs, and then put these tools to use in the modelling of two particular experiments on JJAs. In our presentation of the physics of JJAs, we emphasise phenomena unique to arrays (i.e. not seen in single junction devices such as qubits). We investigate charge transport through the the bilinear array, consisting of two linear chains of JJs, and show that it exhibits both Coulomb drag and depinning. We predict new phenomena arising from the interplay between Coulomb drag and depinning at voltages higher than have so far been experimentally reported. We then turn our attention to recent experiments in which planar JJAs were placed in 3-D microwave cavities, with vortices being injected via an externally applied magnetic eld. We calculate the impedance spectrum using linear response theory, which enables us to see when new vortices enter the system in the form of sharp changes in the resonance frequency.
Superconductivity provides a canonical example of a quantum phase of matter. When superconducting islands are connected by Josephson junctions in a lattice, the low-temperature state of the system can map to the celebrated XY model and its associated universality classes. This has been used to experimentally implement realizations of Mott insulator and Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transitions to vortex dynamics analogous to those in type-II superconductors. When an external magnetic field is added, the effective spins of the XY model become frustrated, leading to the formation of topological defects (vortices). Here, we observe the many-body dynamics of such an array, including frustration, via its coupling to a superconducting microwave cavity. We take the design of the transmon qubit, but replace the single junction between two antenna pads with the complete array. This allows us to probe the system at 10 mK with minimal self-heating by using weak coherent states at the single (microwave) photon level to probe the resonance frequency of the cavity. We observe signatures of an ordered vortex lattice at rational flux fillings of the array.
Injection locking can stabilize a source of radiation, leading to an efficient suppression of noise-induced spectral broadening and therefore, to a narrow spectrum. The technique is well established in laser physics, where a phenomenological description due to Adler is usually sufficient. Recently, locking experiments were performed in Josephson photonics devices, where microwave radiation is created by inelastic Cooper pair tunneling across a dc-biased Josephson junction connected in-series with a microwave resonator. An in-depth theory of locking for such devices, accounting for the Josephson nonlinearity and the specific engineered environments, is lacking. Here, we study injection locking in a typical Josephson photonics device where the environment consists of a single mode cavity, operated in the classical regime. We show that an in-series resistance, however small, is an important ingredient in describing self-sustained Josephson oscillations and enables the locking region. We derive a dynamical equation describing locking, similar to an Adler equation, from the specific circuit equations. The effect of noise on the locked Josephson phase is described in terms of phase slips in a modified washboard potential. For weak noise, the spectral broadening is reduced exponentially with the injection signal. When this signal is provided from a second Josephson device, the two devices synchronize. In the linearized limit, we recover the Kuramoto model of synchronized oscillators. The picture of classical phase slips established here suggests a natural extension towards a theory of locking in the quantum regime.
Josephson junctions constructed from superconductor-semiconductor-superconductor heterostructures have been used to realize a variety of voltage-tunable superconducting quantum devices, including qubits and parametric amplifiers. To date, theoretical descriptions of these systems have been restricted to small quantum fluctuations of the junction phase, making them inapplicable to many experiments. In this paper, we relax this, employing a path-integral formulation where the phase quantum dynamics is obtained self-consistently from an underlying many-body formalism. Our method recovers previously known results for small phase fluctuations, and predicts effects outside of that limit: (i) system capacitances undergo a gate-voltage-dependent renormalization; and (ii) an additional charge offset appears for asymmetric junctions. Our main results can be summarized in terms of a single-particle Hamiltonian, which can be directly compared to that of an ordinary Josephson junction. This more general theory could be a first step towards designing new quantum devices that go qualitatively beyond voltage-tunable variants of previously known circuits.
Deep theoretical understanding of the electrical response of Josephson junctions is indispensable regarding both recent discoveries of new kinds of superconductivity and technological advances such as superconducting quantum computers. Here, we study the microscopic theory of the dc current-biased I-V characteristics of Josephson tunnel junctions. We derive an analytical formula of the I-V characteristics of generic junctions. We identify subharmonics of the I-V characteristics and their underlying mechanism as the feedback effect of intrinsic ac currents generated by voltage pulses in the past. We apply our theory to analytically solve the Werthamer equation and describe various dc current-biased I-V characteristics as a function of softening of the superconducting gap. Strikingly, we identify voltage staircases of the I-V characteristics in a genuine Josephson junction without ac current bias or qubit dynamics. Our general analytical formalism opens new avenues for a microscopic understanding of I-V characteristics of Josephson junctions that have been limited to phenomenological models so far.
Abstract When connecting a voltage-biased Josephson junction in series to several microwave cavities, a Cooper-pair current across the junction gives rise to a continuous emission of strongly correlated photons into the cavity modes. Tuning the bias voltage to the resonance where a single Cooper pair provides the energy to create an additional photon in each of the cavities, we demonstrate the entangling nature of these creation processes by simple witnesses in terms of experimentally accessible observables. To characterize the entanglement properties of the such created quantum states of light to the fullest possible extent, we then proceed to more elaborate entanglement criteria based on the knowledge of the full density matrix and provide a detailed study of bi- and multipartite entanglement. In particular, we illustrate how due to the relatively simple design of these circuits changes of experimental parameters allow one to access a wide variety of entangled states differing, e.g., in the number of entangled parties or the dimension of state space. Such devices, besides their promising potential to act as a highly versatile source of entangled quantum microwaves, may thus represent an excellent natural testbed for classification and quantification schemes developed in quantum information theory.