Assuming only the solubility of Kirchhoff’s laws, the conservation of energy, and the form of the constitutive relations, we present a flux-charge symmetric Hamiltonian formalismthat always admits a symplectic reduction for nonsingular, well-posed circuits involving gyrators, inductors, and capacitors (LCG circuits) with arbitrary non-linearity. The formalism introduces a notion of circuit duality on non-linear non-reciprocal circuits and a family of point transformations that inserts, removes, and moves reciprocal elements across gyrators while preserving the Hamiltonian spectrum. With these transformations, we extend Tellegen’s classic result that gyrators make reciprocal elements behave as their dual to non-linear reciprocal elements such as the Josephson junction and quantum phase slip. Furthermore, we present conditions under which non-reciprocal circuits can be transformed to dynamically equivalent reciprocal circuits.
Many-body systems with strong interactions often exhibit macroscopic behavior markedly absent in single-particle or noninteracting limits. Such emergent phenomena are well exemplifiedin lattice Hubbard models, where the interplay between interactions, geometric frustration, and magnetic flux gives rise to rich physics. Superconducting qubits naturally enable analog quantum simulation of Bose-Hubbard models, while offering tunable parameters, site-resolved control, and rapid experimental repetition rates. Here, we study a superconducting-qubit device that realizes the Bose-Hubbard model on a triangular-ladder lattice. By tuning the magnitude and sign of couplings, we engineer a synthetic magnetic flux to characterize the resulting half-filling ground state for various parameter regimes. We measure observables analogous to current-current correlators and bond kinetic energies, finding signatures consistent with chiral superfluids, Meissner superfluids, and bond-ordered insulators. Our results establish superconducting circuits as a platform for robustly probing quantum phases of matter in frustrated Bose-Hubbard systems, even in strongly correlated and gapless regimes.
The quantum mechanics of superconducting circuits is derived by starting from a classical Hamiltonian dynamical system describing a dissipationless circuit, usually made of capacitiveand inductive elements. However, standard approaches to circuit quantization treat fluxes and charges, which end up as the canonically conjugate degrees of freedom on phase space, asymmetrically. By combining intuition from topological graph theory with a recent symplectic geometry approach to circuit quantization, we present a theory of circuit quantization that treats charges and fluxes on a manifestly symmetric footing. For planar circuits, known circuit dualities are a natural canonical transformation on the classical phase space. We discuss the extent to which such circuit dualities generalize to non-planar circuits.