Optimizing the pump coupling for a three-wave-mixing Josephson parametric amplifier

Abstract

Josephson parametric amplifiers (JPAs) typically require rf pump power that is several orders of magnitude stronger than the maximum signal power they can handle. The low power efficiency and strong pump leakage into the signal circuitry could be critical concerns in practical applications. In this work, we discuss how to optimize the pump coupling scheme for a three-wave mixing JPA by employing microwave filtering techniques, with the goal of maximizing pump power efficiency and minimizing pump leakage without sacrificing other properties of interest. We implement the corresponding filter design in a superconducting nonlinear asymmetric inductive element (SNAIL)-based JPA and demonstrate an improvement of more than 3 orders of magnitude in both power efficiency and pump-leakage suppression compared to a similar device with conventional capacitive coupling, while maintaining state-of-the-art dynamic range and near-quantum-limited noise performance. Furthermore, we show experimentally that the filter-coupled JPA is more robust against noise input from the pump port, exhibiting no significant change in added noise performance with up to 4 K of effective noise temperature at the pump port.

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