Physics
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Item Multi-terminal Josephson effect(2021) Pankratova, Natalia; Manucharyan, Vladimir E; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Conventionally, a Josephson junction is an ubiquitous quantum device formed by a weak link between a pair of superconductors. In this work, we demonstrate the dc Josephson effect in mesoscopic junctions of more than two superconducting terminals. We report fabrication and characterization of the 3- and 4-terminal Josephson junctions built in a top-down fashion from hybrid semiconductor-superconductor InAs/Al epitaxial heterostructures. In general, the critical current of an N-terminal junction is an (N-1)-dimensional hypersurface in the space of bias currents, which can be reduced to a set of critical current contours (CCCs). The CCC is a key ground state characteristic of a multi-terminal Josephson junction, which is readily available from regular electron transport measurements. We investigate nontrivial modifications of the CCC's geometry in response to electrical gating, magnetic field, and phase bias. All observed effects are described by the scattering formulation of the Josephson effect generalized to the case of N>2. Our observations indicate superconducting phase coherence between all the terminals which establishes the Josephson effect in mesoscopic junctions of more than two superconductors. Such multi-terminal junctions could find their applications in a broad range of fields from topologically protected quantum computation to quantum metrology and others.Item Reducing Decoherence in dc SQUID Phase Qubits(2010) Przybysz, Anthony Joseph; Wellstood, Frederick C.; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines sources of dissipation and dephasing in a dc SQUID phase qubit. Coupling of the qubit to the bias lines and lossy dielectrics causes the qubit to lose quantum information through a process known generally as decoherence. Using knowledge of the possible sources of decoherence, a dc SQUID phase qubit is designed with parameters that should have made it resistant to dissipation and dephasing from those sources. Device PB9 was a dc SQUID with one small area 0.23 (μm)2 Josephson junction with a critical current of 130 nA, which was meant to be the qubit junction, and a larger area 5 (μm)2 junction with a critical current of 8.6 μA, which acted as part of an inductive isolation network. The qubit junction was shunted by a 1.5 pF low-loss interdigitated capacitor. The dc current bias line had an on-chip LC filter with a cutoff frequency of 180 MHz. The other control lines were also designed to minimize coupling of dissipative elements to the qubit. According to a theoretical model of the dissipation and dephasing, the qubit was expected to have an energy relaxation T1 ≤ 8.4 μs and dephasing time Tphi ~ 1 μs. Because of the relatively high Josephson inductance of the qubit junction, the device did not act perform like a conventional isolated single-junction phase qubit. Instead, the resonant modes that I observed were the normal modes of the entire SQUID. At 20 mK and a frequency of 4.047 GHz, the maximum energy relaxation time of the device was found to be 350 ± 70 ns, despite the optimized design. Through a study of T1 versus applied flux, T1 was found to depend on the strength of the coupling of the microwave drive line to the qubit. When the line was more coupled, T1 was shorter. This was evidence that the microwave line was overcoupled to the qubit, and was limiting the lifetime of the excited state T1. Through a study of the spectroscopic coherence time T2*, which measured the effects of low-frequency inhomogeneous broadening and higher frequency dephasing from noise, I discovered that device PB9 has several sweet spots. In particular, the presence of a sweet spot with respect to critical current fluctuations allowed me to identify critical current noise as a major source of broadening and dephasing in the qubit. From the spectroscopy I estimated the 1/f critical current noise power density at 1 Hz was and the 1/f flux noise power spectral density at 1 Hz was . Both of these values were quite high, possibly due to switching of the device between measurements.