Non-degenerate pumping of superconducting resonator parametric amplifier with evidence of phase-sensitive amplification

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a non-degenerate pumping scheme for superconducting resonator parametric amplifiers, achieving high gain, bandwidth, and phase-sensitive amplification with improved stability over traditional methods.

Contribution

The authors introduce and experimentally validate a non-degenerate pumping approach that enhances stability and enables phase-sensitive amplification in superconducting resonator amplifiers.

Findings

Achieved a peak gain of 26 dB and 0.5 MHz bandwidth.

Found the non-degenerate scheme to be 4 times more stable than degenerate pumping.

Measured 23 dB gain and 6 dB squeezing ratio with phase-sensitive amplification.

Abstract

Superconducting resonator parametric amplifiers are potentially important components for a wide variety of fundamental physics experiments and utilitarian applications. We propose and realise an operating scheme that achieves amplification through the use of non-degenerate pumps, which addresses two key challenges in the design of parametric amplifiers: non-continuous gain across the amplification band and pump tone removal. We have experimentally demonstrated the non-degenerate pumping scheme using a half-wave resonator amplifier based on NbN thin-film, and measured a peak gain of 26 dB and 3-dB bandwidth of 0.5 MHz. The two non-degenerate pump tones were positioned ~10 bandwidths above and below the frequency at which peak gain occurs. We have found the non-degenerate pumping scheme to be more stable compared to the usual degenerate pumping scheme in terms of gain drift over time, by a factor of 4. This scheme also retains the usual flexibility of NbN resonator parametric amplifiers in terms of reliable amplification in a ~4 K environment, and is suitable for cross-harmonic amplification. The use of pump tones at different frequencies allows phase-sensitive amplification when the signal tone is degenerate with the idler tone. A gain of 23 dB and squeezing ratio of 6 dB were measured.