Speaker
Description
Superconducting qubits have emerged as promising platforms for quantum sensing, including the detection of dark matter candidates that couple to photons, such as axions and hidden photons. Conventional haloscope experiments in the few-gigahertz range can be enhanced using transmon qubits to suppress dark count rates, either exploiting qubit excitation schemes [1] or Quantum Non-Demolition (QND) [2].
In our work, we consider an alternative detection method that leverages a direct energy exchange between the transmon qubit and a photon-coupled dark matter field [3]. A qubit resonant with the dark field undergoes Rabi oscillations, although the weak coupling results in low excitation probabilities within typical transmon coherence times. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a qubit gate-based nonlinear amplification method that effectively enhances the excitation probability, reducing the impact of readout errors and decreasing the number of measurements required for setting competitive exclusion limits on dark matter–electromagnetic coupling strength.
Our approach, compared to the standard method of sampling the Rabi-driven qubit excitation probability, offers up to a ten-fold speedup in hidden photon search experiments, differing from other enhancement schemes [4] by being easier to implement and compatible with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices.
Through numerical simulations, we validate the effectiveness of our scheme, providing an analysis of the detector’s physical implementation. The design leverages a coplanar architecture, and we employ finite element and analytical methods to extract key Hamiltonian parameters, including coupling strengths and transmission spectra. The simplicity of our approach, combined with its substantial performance improvement, represents a significant advance in Dark Matter search via direct excitation, and more generally contributes to the field of low-power microwave detection.
References
[1] 10.1103/PhysRevX.15.021031. [2] 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.141302. [3] 10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.211001. [4] 10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.021801.
| Sessions | Foundational studies |
|---|---|
| Invited | No |