Understanding the saturation power of Josephson Parametric Amplifiers made from SQUIDs arrays

  1. Luca Planat,
  2. Remy Dassonneville,
  3. Javier Puertas Martinez,
  4. Farshad Foroughi,
  5. Olivier Buisson,
  6. Wiebke Hasch-Guichard,
  7. Cecile Naud,
  8. R. Vijay,
  9. Kater Murch,
  10. and Nicolas Roch
We report on the implementation and detailed modelling of a Josephson Parametric Amplifier (JPA) made from an array of eighty Superconducting QUantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs), forming a non-linear quarter-wave resonator. This device was fabricated using a very simple single step fabrication process. It shows a large bandwidth (45 MHz), an operating frequency tunable between 5.9 GHz and 6.8 GHz and a large input saturation power (-117 dBm) when biased to obtain 20 dB of gain. Despite the length of the SQUID array being comparable to the wavelength, we present a model based on an effective non-linear LC series resonator that quantitatively describes these figures of merit without fitting parameters. Our work illustrates the advantage of using array-based JPA since a single-SQUID device showing the same bandwidth and resonant frequency would display a saturation power 15 dB lower.
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