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arXiv:quant-ph/0610008

Quantumness of Josephson junctions reexamined

Robert Alicki

Published Oct 1, 2006• 5 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

There exists an increasing evidence supporting the picture of the Josephson junction (JJ) as a "macroscopic quantum system". On the other hand the interpretation of experimental data strongly depends on the assumed theoretical model. We analyse the possible states of a Cooper pair box ("charge qubit") for the two types of models : two-mode Bose-Hubbard model with its large $N$ aproximations and the many-body description within the mean-field approximation (Gross-Pitaevski equation). While the first class of models supports the picture of JJ being a quantum subsystem of a single degree of freedom, the second approach yields an essentially classical structure of accessible quantum states which, in particular, implies the absence of entanglement for two coupled JJ's. The arguments in favor of the mean-field theory are presented and different experimental tests including a new proposal are briefly discussed.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0610008

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There exists an increasing evidence supporting the picture of the Josephson junction (JJ) as a "macroscopic quantum system". On the other hand the interpretation of experimental data strongly depends on the assumed theoretical model. We analyse the possible states of a Cooper pair box ("charge qubit") for the two types of models : two-mode Bose-Hubbard model with its large NNN aproximations and the many-body description within the mean-field approximation (Gross-Pitaevski equation). While the first class of models supports the picture of JJ being a quantum subsystem of a single degree of freedom, the second approach yields an essentially classical structure of accessible quantum states which, in particular, implies the absence of entanglement for two coupled JJ's. The arguments in favor of the mean-field theory are presented and different experimental tests including a new proposal are briefly discussed.
We compare two physical systems: polarization degrees of freedom of a macroscopic light beam and the Josephson junction (JJ) in the “charge qubit regime”. The first system obviously cannot carry genuine quantum information and we show that the maximal entanglement which could be encoded into polarization of two light beams scales like 1/(photon number). Two theories of JJ, one leading to the picture of “JJ-qubit” and the other based on the mean-field approach are discussed. The later, which seems to be more appropriate, implies that the JJ system is, essentially, mathematically equivalent to the polarization of a light beam with the number of photons replaced by the number of Cooper pairs. The existing experiments consistent with the “JJ-qubit” picture and the theoretical arguments supporting, on the contrary, the classical model are briefly discussed. The Franck-Hertz-type experiment is suggested as an ultimate test of the JJ nature.
There exists a large number of experimental and theoretical results supporting the picture of "macroscopic qubits" implemented by nanoscopic Josephson junctions. On the other hand the standard model of such systems given in terms of a single degree of freedom suggests their semiclassical behavior due to a localization mechanism caused by a strong coupling to an environment. Indeed, such a mechanism is observed in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) placed in a double-well potential - a system mathematically equivalent to a Josephson junction. In this note it is shown, on the example of a Cooper pair box, that replacing the BEC-type model for Cooper pairs by a lattice gas model one can reduce the environmental effects of "dequantization" and can explain the experimental data in particular the existing huge differences between the measured values of relaxation times.
The recent experimental evidence for entangled states of two Josephson junction qubits is briefly discussed. It is argued that the interpretation of the experimental data strongly depends on the assumed theoretical model. Namely, the qubit states are supposed to be the lowest lying eigenstates of a certain effective Hamiltonian and hence automatically orthogonal, while the simple analysis within a more fundamental many-particle model shows that those states should strongly overlap. This makes the standard interpretation of the measurement procedure questionable.
There exists a large number of experimental and theoretical results supporting the picture of macroscopic qubits implemented by nanoscopic Josephson junctions of three different types -- charge qubit, flux qubit and phase qubit. The standard unified description of such systems is based on the formal quantization of the phenomenological Kirchhoff equations for the corresponding circuits. In this paper a simplified version of the BCS theory for superconductors is used to derive microscopic models for all types of small Josephson junctions. For these models the state-dependent individual tunneling of Cooper pairs couples ground pair states with excited pair states what leads to a more complicated structure of the lowest lying energy levels. In particular, the highly degenerate levels emerge, which act as probability sinks for the qubit. These models allow also for the coupling to phonons as an efficient mechanism of relaxation for all types of junctions. The alternative formulas concerning basic spectral parameters of superconducting qubits are presented and compared with the experimental data. Finally, the question whether small Josephson junctions can be treated as macroscopic quantum systems is briefly discussed.
We study atomic Josephson junctions (AJJs) with one and two bosonic species confined by a double-well potential. Proceeding from the second quantized Hamiltonian, we show that it is possible to describe the zero-temperature AJJ microscopic dynamics by means of extended Bose–Hubbard (EBH) models, which include usually neglected nonlinear terms. Within the mean-field approximation, the Heisenberg equations derived from such two-mode models provide a description of AJJ macroscopic dynamics in terms of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). We discuss the possibility of distinguishing the Rabi, Josephson and Fock regimes in terms of the macroscopic parameters which appear in the EBH Hamiltonians, and then in the ODEs. We compare the predictions for the relative populations of the Bose gas atoms in the two wells obtained from the numerical solutions of the two-mode ODEs, with those deriving from the direct numerical integration of the Gross–Pitaevskii equations (GPEs). Our investigations show that the nonlinear terms of the ODEs are crucial to achieve a good agreement between the ODE and GPE approaches, and in particular to give quantitative predictions of the self-trapping regime.
The standard phenomenological Hamiltonian of a small superconducting Josephson junction in the charge regime (Cooper Pair Box) produces a model of the effective charge qubit with possible applications to quantum information processing. In this note a new model based on the BCS Hamiltonian with individual tunneling yields an effective multi-level picture with a highly degenerated level placed between the ground state and the excited state. Unlike in the standard approach, the excited Cooper pairs play here an important role. For such a system coupled to a zero temperature bath the additional levels act as a probability sink. In contrast to the standard large-spin model the coupling to phonons can be an effective source of dissipation. This model provides also alternative explanations of various effects observed in experiments and sheds new light on the issue of Josephson junctions as macroscopic quantum systems.