Experimental verification of the treatment of time-dependent flux in circuit quantization

Abstract

Recent theoretical work has highlighted that quantizing a superconducting circuit in the presence of timedependent flux Φ(t) generally produces Hamiltonian terms proportional to dΦ/dt unless a special allocation of the flux across inductive terms is chosen. Here, we present an experiment probing the effects of a fast flux ramp applied to a heavy-fluxonium circuit. The experiment confirms that naïve omission of the dΦ/dt term leads to theoretical predictions inconsistent with experimental data. Experimental data are fully consistent with recent theory that includes the derivative term or equivalently uses "irrotational variables" that uniquely allocate the flux to properly eliminate the dΦ/dt term.