Observation of Shapiro steps in an ultracold atomic Josephson junction
The current-voltage characteristic of a driven superconducting Josephson junction displays discrete steps. This phenomenon, called the Shapiro steps, forms today's voltage standard. In this work, we report the observation of Shapiro steps in a driven Josephson junction in a gas of ultracold atoms. We demonstrate that the steps exhibit universal features and provide insight into the microscopic dissipative dynamics that we directly observe in the experiment. We find that the steps are directly connected to phonon emission and nucleation of solitonic excitations, whose dynamics we follow in space and time. The experimental results are underpinned by extensive numerical simulations based on classical-field dynamics and may enable metrological and fundamental advances.
Authors
- Erik Bernhart (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2268-0540)
- Marvin Röhrle (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2257-1504)
- Herwig Ott (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3155-2719)
- Vijay Pal Singh (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8881-978X)
- Luigi Amico (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9024-5727)
- Ludwig Mathey (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4341-7335)
Institutions
- University of Kaiserslautern (DE)
- Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information Innsbruck (AT)
- University of Catania (IT)
- Technology Innovation Institute (AE)
- Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Catania (IT)
- Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (DE)
- Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging
Publication Details
- Journal
- Science
- Published
- 2025-12-11
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ads9061
- Citations
- 4
- Primary Topic
- Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 4.99