One-dimensional Josephson junction arrays: Lifting the Coulomb blockade by depinning

Experiments with one-dimensional arrays of Josephson junctions in the regime of dominating charging energy show that the Coulomb blockade is lifted at the threshold voltage, which is proportional to the array's length and depends strongly on the Josephson energy. We explain this behavior as depinning of the Cooper-pair-charge-density by the applied voltage. We assume strong charge disorder and argue that physics around the depinning point is governed by a disordered sine-Gordon-like model. This allows us to employ the well-known theory of charge density wave depinning. Our model is in good agreement with the experimental data.