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Searching for Dark Matter with a Superconducting Qubit

Akash V. Dixit, Srivatsan Chakram, Kevin He, Ankur Agrawal, Ravi K. Naik, David I. Schuster, and Aaron Chou
Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 141302 – Published 8 April 2021
Physics logo See synopsis: Qubits Could Act as Sensitive Dark Matter Detectors
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Abstract

Detection mechanisms for low mass bosonic dark matter candidates, such as the axion or hidden photon, leverage potential interactions with electromagnetic fields, whereby the dark matter (of unknown mass) on rare occasion converts into a single photon. Current dark matter searches operating at microwave frequencies use a resonant cavity to coherently accumulate the field sourced by the dark matter and a near standard quantum limited (SQL) linear amplifier to read out the cavity signal. To further increase sensitivity to the dark matter signal, sub-SQL detection techniques are required. Here we report the development of a novel microwave photon counting technique and a new exclusion limit on hidden photon dark matter. We operate a superconducting qubit to make repeated quantum nondemolition measurements of cavity photons and apply a hidden Markov model analysis to reduce the noise to 15.7 dB below the quantum limit, with overall detector performance limited by a residual background of real photons. With the present device, we perform a hidden photon search and constrain the kinetic mixing angle to ε1.68×1015 in a band around 6.011 GHz (24.86μeV) with an integration time of 8.33 s. This demonstrated noise reduction technique enables future dark matter searches to be sped up by a factor of 1,300. By coupling a qubit to an arbitrary quantum sensor, more general sub-SQL metrology is possible with the techniques presented in this Letter.

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  • Received 19 October 2020
  • Revised 5 February 2021
  • Accepted 22 February 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.141302

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Quantum Information, Science & TechnologyParticles & Fields

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Qubits Could Act as Sensitive Dark Matter Detectors

Published 8 April 2021

A detector made from superconducting qubits could allow researchers to search for dark matter particles 1000 times faster than other techniques can.

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Authors & Affiliations

Akash V. Dixit1,2,3,*, Srivatsan Chakram1,2,4, Kevin He1,2, Ankur Agrawal1,2,3, Ravi K. Naik5, David I. Schuster1,2,6, and Aaron Chou7

  • 1James Franck Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA
  • 2Department of Physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA
  • 3Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA
  • 4Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854, USA
  • 5Department of Physics, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • 6Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA
  • 7Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois 60510, USA

  • *avdixit@uchicago.edu

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Vol. 126, Iss. 14 — 9 April 2021

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