Microwave phase locking of Josephson-junction fluxon oscillators

Application of the classic McLaughlin-Scott soliton perturbation theory to a Josephson-junction fluxon subjected to a microwave field that interacts with the fluxon only at the junction boundaries reduces the problem of phase locking of the fluxon oscillation to the study of a two-dimensional functional map. Phase-locked states correspond to fixed points of the map. For junctions of in-line geometry, the existence and stability of such fixed points can be studied analytically. Study of overlap-geometry junctions requires the numerical inversion of a functional equation, but the results are qualitatively very similar. The map predicts significantly different behaviors for locking at odd and even subharmonic frequencies and at superharmonic frequencies. It also gives indications regarding hysteresis in the current-voltage characteristic, the existence of zero-crossing steps, and a description of the locking process in the frequency domain. The principal merit of the map is that it captures much of the experimental phenomenology at a very low computational cost.