Josephson Junction Ladders: Ground State and Relaxation Phenomena

TL;DR

This paper investigates the ground state properties and relaxation dynamics of a Josephson junction ladder array with anisotropic couplings, revealing complex energy landscapes and slow relaxation phenomena.

Contribution

It provides a rigorous analysis of the ground state phase diagram and elementary excitations for the ladder system using a mapping to the chiral XY model.

Findings

Ground state phase diagram characterized rigorously

Elementary excitations identified

System exhibits slow relaxation due to metastable states

Abstract

This paper considers a Josephson Junction array with the geometry of a ladder and anisotropy in the Josephson couplings. The ground state problem for the ladder corresponds to the one for the one-dimensional chiral XY model in a two-fold anisotropy field, which allows of a rigorous characterization of the ground state phase diagram and the relevant elementary excitations for the system. The approach to equilibrium, which we study using Langevin dynamics, shows slow relaxation, typical of systems whose energy landscape in the configuration space consists of a wealthy of metastable states, dynamically disconnected.