Coherent dynamics in long fluxonium qubits

We analyze the coherent dynamics of a fluxonium device (Manucharyan et al 2009 Science 326 113) formed by a superconducting ring of Josephson junctions in which strong quantum phase fluctuations are localized exclusively on a single weak element. In such a system, quantum phase tunnelling by $2\pi$ occurring at the weak element couples the states of the ring with supercurrents circulating in opposite directions, while the rest of the ring provides an intrinsic electromagnetic environment of the qubit. Taking into account the capacitive coupling between nearest neighbors and the capacitance to the ground, we show that the homogeneous part of the ring can sustain electrodynamic modes which couple to the two levels of the flux qubit. In particular, when the number of Josephson junctions is increased, several low-energy modes can have frequencies lower than the qubit frequency. This gives rise to a quasiperiodic dynamics, which manifests itself as a decay of oscillations between the two counterpropagating current states at short times, followed by oscillation-like revivals at later times. We analyze how the system approaches such a dynamics as the ring's length is increased and discuss possible experimental implications of this non-adiabatic regime.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures (new, substantially revised version

Full counting statistics of a chaotic cavity with asymmetric leads

We study the statistics of charge transport in a chaotic cavity attached to external reservoirs by two openings of different size which transmit non-equal number of quantum channels. An exact formula for the cumulant generating function has been derived by means of the Keldysh-Green function technique within the circuit theory of mesoscopic transport. The derived formula determines the full counting statistics of charge transport, i.e., the probability distribution and all-order cumulants of current noise. It is found that, for asymmetric cavities, in contrast to other mesoscopic systems, the third-order cumulant changes the sign at high biases. This effect is attributed to the skewness of the distribution of transmission eigenvalues with respect to forward/backward scattering. For a symmetric cavity we find that the third cumulant approaches a voltage-independent constant proportional to the temperature and the number of quantum channels in the leads.Comment: new section on probability distribution and new references adde