A Josephson Junction Microscope for Low-frequency Fluctuators.pdf

a r X i v : 0 7 0 5 .1 3 8 0 v 1 [ c o n d - m a t .m e s - h a l l ] 1 0 M a y 2 0 0 7 A Josephson Junction Microscope for Low-frequency Fluctuators L. Tian1, ? and R. W. Simmonds2, ? 1Department of Applied Physics and E. L. Ginzton Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 2National Institute of Standards and Technology, 325 Broadway, Boulder, Colorado 80305-3328, USA (Dated: February 1, 2008) The high-Q harmonic oscillator mode of a Josephson junction can be used as a novel probe of spurious two-level systems (TLSs) inside the amorphous oxide tunnel barriers of the junction. In particular, we show that spectroscopic transmission measurements of the junction resonator mode can reveal how the coupling magnitude between the junction and the TLSs varies with an external magnetic field applied in the plane of the tunnel barrier. The proposed experiments offer the possibility of clearly resolving the underlying coupling mechanism for these spurious TLSs, an important decoherence source limiting the quality of superconducting quantum devices. Superconducting quantum circuits have been inten- sively tested in various regimes in the past few years, from superconducting qubits demonstrating long coher- ence times, to superconducting transmission line cav- ities coherently coupled to a Single Cooper Pair box [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Such circuits are extremely sensitive to very small quanta and defect states, and hence have the ability to detect individual microwave photons, charged quasiparticles, as well as spurious TLSs within or near Josephson junction tunnel barriers [7, 8, 9, 10, 11]. In recent experiments [10, 11], TLSs were identified through spectroscopic measurements of a superconducting phase qubit appearing as ‘gaps” or “splittings” in the energy spectrum. The TLS defects can be an unwanted source of de- coherence for superconducting quantum bits. The low- frequency noise, which has been shown to be a seri- ous source of decoherence for superconduct