Variational tight-binding method for simulating large superconducting circuits

Abstract

We generalize solid-state tight-binding techniques for the spectral analysis of large superconducting circuits. We find that tight-binding states can be better suited for approximating the low-energy excitations than charge basis states, as illustrated for the interesting example of the current-mirror circuit. The use of tight binding can dramatically lower the Hilbert-space dimension required for convergence to the true spectrum, and allows for the accurate simulation of larger circuits that are out of reach of charge basis diagonalization.