Effective Study of Superconducting Quantum Circuits

Abstract

We apply the momentous quantum mechanics formalism to the non-perturbative study of superconducting circuits in the transmon regime, deriving effective equations of motion for the bare Josephson junction (JJ), the cavity--JJ system, and a dissipative resonator. A Gaussian closure on the hierarchy of quantum moments resums the full cosine nonlinearity into the closed-form effective Hamiltonian $\tfrac{1}{2}[V(ϕ+ϕ_s)+V(ϕ-ϕ_s)]$, which is non-perturbative and preserves the periodicity and boundedness of the Josephson potential at all phase amplitudes; the standard Kerr (Duffing) approximation is recovered as a special case. We derive the quantum-dressed frequency $ω_{\rm eff}=Ω_p\sqrt{\cos(ϕ_{\rm zpf}/ϕ_0)}$, and benchmark the effective dynamics against exact Mathieu-function diagonalization, with the quantum width $G^{2,0}(t)$ providing the most sensitive diagnostic of the closure's validity and marks the boundary of the Gaussian approximation more sharply than $\langle\hatϕ\rangle(t)$ does. We compare the Caldirola--Kanai, Bateman, and Lindblad descriptions: the Bateman dynamics, quantized with a switched symplectic structure, preserves the Heisenberg bound, admits exact closed-form moment solutions, and reproduces the Lindblad benchmark for weak damping, i.e., within the analytic error bound $(λ/ω_1)^2\,ϕ_{\rm zpf}^2$.