Voltage-current curves for small Josephson junction arrays: Semiclassical treatment

We compute the current-voltage characteristic of a chain of identical Josephson circuits characterized by a large ratio of Josephson to charging energy that are envisioned as the implementation of topologically protected qubits. We show that in the limit of small coupling to the environment, it exhibits a nonmonotonous behavior with a maximum voltage followed by a parametrically large region where V∝1∕I. We argue that its experimental measurement provides a direct probe of the amplitude of the quantum transitions in constituting Josephson circuits and thus allows their full characterization.