Phase-slips and Coulomb blockade illustrated with devices

Location: Hörsaal A (1.3.14) Time: Monday, February 21, 2011, 14 h s.t.

 

While incoherent slips of superconducting phase in quasi-1d wires are known for more than 50 years, the experimental evidence for coherent ones is just emerging. To facilitate experimental work in this direction, we consider simple "devices" where we account for phase slips at phenomenological level. Interestingly, the phase slips provide isolation of charge in the wires, resulting in observable Coulomb blockade effects. The non-linearities found in an oscillator where superconducting inductance is subject to coherent phase slips, oscillate as a function of number of photons N with a period of the order of square root of N, which is the "width" of the coherent state. We prove that such non-linearities result in multiple metastable states encompassing few photons and study oscillatory dependence of various responses of the resonator. The experimental realization of our proposal can deliver an unambiguous verification of coherent quantum phase slips.

 

 

More information:  P. Brouwer   

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