Synchronization of Bloch oscillations by gate voltage modulation

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to synchronize Bloch oscillations using gate voltage modulation in a double phase-slip junction, resulting in quantized current plateaux and revealing fractional plateaux at intermediate coupling regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach of gate voltage modulation for synchronization, analyzing different coupling regimes and fractional plateaux phenomena.

Findings

Gate voltage modulation effectively synchronizes Bloch oscillations.

Quantized current plateaux of Coulomb blockade width are observed.

Fractional plateaux appear in intermediate coupling regime.

Abstract

We propose to synchronize Bloch oscillations in a double phase-slip junction by modulating the gate voltage rather than the bias voltage. We show this is advantageous and the relatively small a.c. modulation of the gate voltage gives rise to the pronounced plateaux of quantized current of the width of the order of Coulomb blockade threshold. We theoretically investigate the setup distinguishing three regimes of the strong, weak, and intermediate coupling defined by the ratio of the gate capacitance $C$ and the effective capacitance of the phase-slip junctions. An important feature of the intermediate coupling regime is the occurrence of the fractional plateaux of the quantized current. We investigate the finite temperature effects finding an empirical scaling for the smoothing of integer plateaux.