Bolometric detection of Josephson inductance in a highly resistive environment

Abstract

The Josephson junction is a building block of quantum circuits. Its behavior, well understood when treated as an isolated entity, is strongly affected by coupling to an electromagnetic environment. In 1983, Schmid predicted that a Josephson junction shunted by a resistance exceeding the resistance quantum ${\text{R}}_{\mathrm{Q}}=h/4e^2\approx 6.45$ k$\mathbf{\Omega }$ for Cooper pairs would become insulating since the phase fluctuations would destroy the coherent Josephson coupling. However, recent microwave measurements have questioned this interpretation. Here, we insert a small Josephson junction in a Johnson-Nyquist-type setup where it is driven by weak current noise arising from thermal fluctuations. Our heat probe minimally perturbs the junction's equilibrium, shedding light on features not visible in charge transport. We find that the Josephson critical current completely vanishes in DC charge transport measurement, and the junction demonstrates Coulomb blockade in agreement with the theory. Surprisingly, thermal transport measurements show that the Josephson junction acts as an inductor at high frequencies, unambiguously demonstrating that a supercurrent survives despite the Coulomb blockade observed in DC measurements. The discrepancy between these two measurements highlights the difference between the low and the high frequency response of a junction and calls for further theoretical and experimental inputs on the dynamics of Josephson junctions \textcolor{black}{operating at high frequencies in highly resistive environments.

arXiv commentFinal version accepted for publication

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• Extremely weak sub-kelvin electron-phonon coupling in InAs On Insulator
• Tunable Thermoelectric Superconducting Heat Pipe and Diode
• Thermal junctions controlled with Aharonov-Bohm phases
• Photonic heat transport through a Josephson junction in a resistive environment
• Quantum thermal machine as a rectifier
• Limitations of Caldeira-Leggett model for description of phase transitions in superconducting circuits
• Resilience of the quantum critical line in the Schmid transition
• Nonlinear response theory for lossy superconducting quantum circuits
• Interaction-induced dissipative quantum phase transition in a head-to-tail atomic Josephson junction
• Photonic heat amplifiers based on a disordered semiconductor
• Revisiting dissipation-driven phase transition in a Josephson junction