Colloquia

The ongoing development of superconducting qubits has brought some basic questions of many-body physics to the research forefront, and helped solve several of them. I will address two effects in quantum condensed matter highlighted by the development of a fluxonium qubit. The first one is the so-called cosine-phi problem stemming from the seminal paper of Brian Josephson. It predicted the phase dependence of the dissipative current across the Josephson junction. A fluxonium qubit enabled the observation of the effect, after nearly 50 years of unsuccessful attempts by other techniques. The second one is inelastic scattering ("splitting") of a microwave photon by quantum fluctuations of phase across a Josephson junction. This effect is the elementary mechanism driving the Schmid transition, which predicts a collapse of the Josephson current in a junction influenced by a dissipative environment.