We evaluate the microwave admittance of a one-dimensional chain of fluxonium qubits coupled by shared inductors. Despite its simplicity, this system exhibits a rich phase diagram. Acritical applied magnetic flux separates a homogeneous ground state from a phase with a ground state exhibiting inhomogeneous persistent currents. Depending on the parameters of the array, the phase transition may be a conventional continuous one, or of a commensurate-incommensurate nature. Furthermore, quantum fluctuations affect the transition and possibly lead to the presence of gapless „floating phases“. The signatures of the soft modes accompanying the transitions appear as a characteristic frequency dependence of the dissipative part of admittance.
Superconducting circuits have attracted growing interest in recent years as a promising candidate for fault-tolerant quantum information processing. Extensive efforts have always beentaken to completely shield these circuits from external magnetic field to protect the integrity of superconductivity. Surprisingly, here we show vortices can dramatically improve the performance of superconducting qubits by reducing the lifetimes of detrimental single-electron-like excitations known as quasiparticles. Using a contactless injection technique with unprecedented dynamic range, we directly demonstrate the power-law decay characteristics of the canonical quasiparticle recombination process, and show quantization of quasiparticle trapping rate due to individual vortices. Each vortex in our aluminium film shows a quasiparticle „trapping power“ of 0.067±0.005 cm2/s, enough to dominate over the vanishingly weak recombination in a modern transmon qubit. These results highlight the prominent role of quasiparticle trapping in future development of quantum circuits, and provide a powerful characterization tool along the way.
As the energy relaxation time of superconducting qubits steadily improves, non-equilibrium quasiparticle excitations above the superconducting gap emerge as an increasingly relevantlimit for qubit coherence. We measure fluctuations in the number of quasiparticle excitations by continuously monitoring the spontaneous quantum jumps between the states of a fluxonium qubit, in conditions where relaxation is dominated by quasiparticle loss. Resolution on the scale of a single quasiparticle is obtained by performing quantum non-demolition projective measurements within a time interval much shorter than T1, using a quantum limited amplifier (Josephson Parametric Converter). The quantum jumps statistics switches between the expected Poisson distribution and a non-Poissonian one, indicating large relative fluctuations in the quasiparticle population, on time scales varying from seconds to hours. This dynamics can be modified controllably by injecting quasiparticles or by seeding quasiparticle-trapping vortices by cooling down in magnetic field.
Quantum fluctuations in an anharmonic superconducting circuit enable
frequency conversion of individual incoming photons. This effect, linear in the
photon beam intensity, leads toramifications for the standard input-output
circuit theory. We consider an extreme case of anharmonicity in which photons
scatter off a small set of weak links within a Josephson junction array. We
show that this quantum impurity displays Kondo physics and evaluate the elastic
and inelastic photon scattering cross sections. These cross sections reveal
many-body properties of the Kondo problem that are hard to access in its
traditional fermionic version.