A dynamical crossover regime during evanescent-wave amplification

Abstract

A dynamical crossover regime is revealed when exposing a classical two-dimensional–ordered Josephson junction (JJ) array to evanescent waves and tuning the incident microwave power. At the lowest possible temperature for these experiments, 1.1 K, and at the lowest power setting, , evanescent waves are transmitted without loss and the resonance exhibits a quality factor of . A second, smaller resonance, which evolves with increasing power from the main resonance, is also investigated. In contrast to the behavior of the main resonance, this second peak grows as the incident power is increased and does not maintain a fixed resonant frequency for temperatures less than the superconducting critical temperature of niobium. The tunability of both resonances is studied as a function of temperature and microwave power. Finally, we speculate that this dynamical crossover regime is evidence of a transition between two states of phase coherence where at low microwave power the JJ arrays are phase locked and at high microwave power the JJ arrays are unlocked.