No Arabic abstract
The authors report on the design and measurement of a reflective single-pole single-throw microwave switch with no internal power dissipation, based on a superconducting circuit containing a single Josephson junction. The data demonstrate the switch operation with 2 GHz instantaneous bandwidth centered at 10 GHz, low insertion loss, and better than 20 dB on/off ratio. The switchs measured performance agrees well with simulations for input powers up to -100 dBm. An extension of the demonstrated circuit to implement a single-pole double-throw switch is shown in simulation.
We demonstrate Josephson junction based double-balanced mixer and phase shifter circuits operating at 6-10 GHz, and integrate these components to implement both a monolithic amplitude/phase vector modulator and a quadrature mixer. The devices are actuated by flux signals, dissipate no power on chip, exhibit input saturation powers in excess of 1 nW, and provide cryogenic microwave modulation solutions for integrated control of superconducting qubits.
We develop an analytic theory for the recently demonstrated Josephson Junction laser (Science 355, p. 939, 2017). By working in the time-domain representation (rather than the frequency-domain) a single non-linear equation is obtained for the dynamics of the device, which is fully solvable in some regimes of operation. The nonlinear drive is seen to lead to mode-locked output, with a period set by the round-trip time of the resonant cavity.
We present an experimental investigation of stochastic switching of a bistable Josephson junctions 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 law. 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.
Preliminary results are presented concerning static properties of a small Josephson junction under the influence of strong microwave radiation. We discuss the correspondence between a Brownian particle moving in a periodic potential and superconducting phase difference in a small Josephson junction. Next, we describe an experimental method of determining the amplitude of microwave current flowing across the junction. Typical examples of static characteristics of the junction are presented, including its dynamical resistance as a function of microwave power. We discuss also the influence of an external magnetic field on the junction dynamics and show that in this case the one-dimensional Stewart-McCumber model becomes insufficient.
We have constructed a microwave detector based on the voltage switching of an underdamped Josephson junction, that is positioned at a current antinode of a {lambda}/4 coplanar waveguide resonator. By measuring the switching current and the transmission through a waveguide capacitively coupled to the resonator at different drive frequencies and temperatures we are able to fully characterize the system and assess its detection efficiency and sensitivity. Testing the detector by applying a classical microwave field with the strength of a single photon yielded a sensitivity parameter of 0.5 in qualitative agreement with theoretical calculations.