Modeling of Josephson Traveling Wave Parametric Amplifiers

The recent developments in quantum technologies, as well as advanced detection experiments, have raised the need to detect extremely weak signals in the microwave frequency spectrum. To this aim, the Josephson travelling wave parametric amplifier, a device capable of reaching the quantum noise limit while providing a wide bandwidth, has been proposed as a suitable cryogenic front-end amplifier. This work deals with the numerical study of a Josephson travelling wave parametric amplifier, without approximations regarding the nonlinearity of the key elements. In particular, we focus on the investigation of the system of coupled nonlinear differential equations representing all the cells of the Josephson travelling wave parametric amplifier, with proper input and output signals at the boundaries. The investigation of the output signals generated by the parametric amplification process explores the phase-space and the Fourier spectral analysis of the output voltage, as a function of the parameters describing the pump and signal tones that excite the device. Beside the expected behavior, i.e., the signal amplification, we show that, depending on the system operation, unwanted effects (such as pump tone harmonics, incommensurate frequency generation, and noise rise), which are not accounted for in simple linearized approaches, can be generated in the whole nonlinear system. © 2002-2011 IEEE.