Impact of Pump Phase-Noise on Josephson Traveling-Wave Parametric Amplifiers

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 10 Apr 2026] Impact of Pump Phase-Noise on Josephson Traveling-Wave Parametric Amplifiers Daryoush Shiri, Likai Yang, Saesun Kim, Mohamed A. Hassan, Philip Krantz, Eric T. Holland Superconducting traveling-wave parametric amplifiers (TWPAs) are essential elements for enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and thus the read-out fidelity of superconducting qubits because of their high gain and near quantum-limited noise. However, the impact of the pump source, e.g., phase noise on these amplifiers, has not yet been studied. In this work, we show that among the two amplification processes in JTWPAs, the three-wave mixing (3WM) process is more sensitive to the pump phase noise than the four-wave mixing (4WM) process. We show that the even-order nonlinearity of 4th order and above in three-wave mixing is responsible for more than 10 dB increase of phase noise at high frequency offsets within the phase noise mask as the power of the pump increases. A polynomial model of the amplifier and cyclo-stationary property of phase noise also corroborate with the simulations. The Harmonic Balance (HB) periodic noise analysis tool and Leeson phase noise model in Keysight Advanced Design System (ADS) simulator were used in this study. Comments: 6 pages, 8 figures, Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2604.08955 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2604.08955v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.08955 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Daryoush Shiri Dr. [view email] [v1] Fri, 10 Apr 2026 04:52:47 UTC (775 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)