Building large-scale superconducting quantum circuits will require miniaturisation and integration of supporting devices including microwave circulators, which are currently bulky,stand-alone components. Here we report the realisation of a passive on-chip circulator which is made from a loop consisting of three tunnel-coupled superconducting islands, with DC-only control fields. We observe the effect of quasiparticle tunnelling, and we dynamically classify the system into different quasiparticle sectors. When tuned for circulation, the device exhibits strongly non-reciprocal 3-port scattering, with average on-resonance insertion loss of 2 dB, isolation of 14 dB, power reflectance of -11 dB, and a bandwidth of 200 MHz.
Microwave circulators play an important role in quantum technology based on superconducting circuits. The conventional circulator design, which employs ferrite materials, is bulky andinvolves strong magnetic fields, rendering it unsuitable for integration on superconducting chips. One promising design for an on-chip superconducting circulator is based on a passive Josephson-junction ring. In this paper, we consider two operational issues for such a device: circuit tuning and the effects of quasiparticle tunneling. We compute the scattering matrix using adiabatic elimination and derive the parameter constraints to achieve optimal circulation. We then numerically optimize the circulator performance over the full set of external control parameters, including gate voltages and flux bias, to demonstrate that this multi-dimensional optimization converges quickly to find optimal working points. We also consider the possibility of quasiparticle tunneling in the circulator ring and how it affects signal circulation. Our results form the basis for practical operation of a passive on-chip superconducting circulator made from a ring of Josephson junctions.
We describe a superconducting circuit consisting of a Josephson junction in parallel with a quantum phase slip wire, which implements a Hamiltonian that is periodic in both charge andflux. This Hamiltonian is exactly diagonalisable in a double-Bloch band, and the eigenstates are shown to be code states of the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill quantum error correcting code. The eigenspectrum has several critical points, where the linear sensitivity to external charge and flux noise vanishes. The states at these critical points thus hold promise as qubit states that are insensitive to external noise sources.