Effect of temperature on the resonant macroscopic quantum tunneling in small Josephson junctions

The study of the quantum behavior of Josephson junctions is interesting not only by itself, but also for the technological importance in electronics employing superconducting weak links. Recently great attention has been devoted to the effects of Resonant Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling (RMQT) between levels with the same energy in neighbouring wells of the potential shape describing the junction. This can produce voltage spikes along the supercurrent branch of the I-V curves and peaks in the current switching distributions. Schmidt, Clealand, and Clarke have presented a detailed analysis of the resonant tunnel dynamics for the T=0 case. The present paper is based on a different theoretical approach, first proposed by Larkin and Ovchinnikov, which allows to include explicitly the temperature. We study the phenomenon in its time dependence and this allows to consider the lifetime of the voltage spikes as well as the effect of the RMQT on the quantum escape rate out of the V=0 state.