Large-amplitude harmonic driving of highly coherent flux qubits

ALEJANDRO FERRON; MARIA JOSE SANCHEZ; DANIEL DOMINGUEZ

PHYSICAL REVIEW B

AMER PHYSICAL SOC

Año: 2010 vol. 82 p. 134522 - 134522

1098-0121

The device for the Josephson flux qubit can be considered as a solid-state artificial atom with multiple energy levels. When a large-amplitude harmonic excitation is applied to the system, transitions at the energy levels avoided crossings produce visible changes in the qubit population over many driven periods that are accompanied by a rich pattern of interference phenomena. We present a Floquet treatment of the periodically time-dependent Schrödinger equation of the strongly driven qubit beyond the standard two-level approach. For low amplitudes, the average probability of a given sign of the persistent current qubit exhibits, as a function of the static flux detuning and the driving amplitude, Landau-Zener-Stückelberg (LZS) interference patterns that evolve into complex diamondlike patterns for large amplitudes. In the case of highly coherent flux qubits we show that the higher-order diamonds can not be simply described relying on LZS transitions in each avoided crossing considered separately. In addition we propose a spectroscopic method based on starting the system in the first excited state instead of in the ground state, which can give further information on the energy-level spectrum and dynamics in the case of highly coherent flux qubits. We compare our numerical results with recent experiments that perform amplitude spectroscopy to probe the energy spectrum of the artificial atom.