Charging effects in small capacitance Josephson junction circuits

Sammanfattning: This thesis describes fabrication, measurements and analysisof two different Josephson junction circuits; the Cooper pairtransistor (CPT) and the one dimensional Josephson junctionarray (JJA). All experiments are conducted in a dilutionrefrigerator with a base temperature of 15{30 mK.In the experiments on CPTs the maximum supercurrent,called the switch- ing current, is measured versus the gatecharge. The importance of filtering of the measurement leads inorder to suppress quasi-particle excitations and to get2e-periodic switching currents is demonstrated. Normal metalgold leads close to the CPTs are introduced to further reducethe effect of quasi-particles. To prove that switching currentis 2e-periodic, magnetic fields and increased temperatures areused to induce a transition to e-periodicity. CPTs where eachJosephson junction is replaced by a Superconducting QuantumInterference de- vice (SQUID) have also been fabricated andmeasured. The SQUIDs make it possible to tune the effectiveJosephson energy with an external magnetic field. The measuredswitching current is tunable in magnitude and 2e-periodic. Theswitching currents are compared with theory. Good agreementbetween the- ory and experiments is found using a model of theCPT in an electrodynamic environment with a high effectivetemperature.The JJAs are also fabricated with a SQUID geometry toenable tuning of the effective Josephson energy. The currentvoltage characteristics (IVCs) of the measured JJAs exhibit aCoulomb blockade of Cooper pair tunneling which is tunable withmagnetic field and periodic with the ux quanta. The IVCs of theJJA show a region of negative differential resistance, alsocalled back- bending. This is interpreted as evidence of Blochoscillations in the JJAs. Two different models are discussed toexplain the measured IVC.The thesis ends by presenting a theoretical proposal ona Josephson junction charge qubit, called the array-qubit. Thearray-qubit consists of an array with N SQUIDs and N +1islands. The two basis states of the qubit corresponds to anexcess Cooper pair on either island 1 or N +1. These two statesare coupled through an Nth-order tunneling process which makesit possible to effectively suppress the Josephson coupling.This facilitate a long relaxation time so that the state of thequbit can be read with a slow detector.