Dark Matter Induced Power in Quantum Devices

We point out that power measurements of single quasiparticle devices open a new avenue to detect dark matter (DM). The threshold of these devices is set by the Cooper pair binding energy, and is therefore so low that they can detect DM as light as about an MeV incoming from the Galactic halo, as well as the low-velocity thermalized DM component potentially present in the Earth. Using existing power measurements with these new devices, as well as power measurements with SuperCDMS-CPD, we set new constraints on the spin-independent DM scattering cross section for DM masses from about 10 MeV to 10 GeV. We outline future directions to improve sensitivity to both halo DM and a thermalized DM population in the Earth using power deposition in quantum devices.

Figure 1

The qualitative difference between our proposal and a conventional DM direct detection experiment. The noise arises from frequent interaction between DM and the nuclei in the detector, as opposed to once-in-a-while recoil of a nucleus from DM scattering.

Figure 2

New limits on spin-independent DM-nucleon scattering cross section ${\sigma }_{\chi N}$ derived in this work, using quantum devices. We show halo DM limits from quasiparticle production measurement (orange) and SuperCDMS-CPD (magenta). “Thermalized DM” (blue) is our new constraint on the thermalized DM population, with several experiments overlapping in their exclusion of this population. The gray regions are other existing limits; see text for discussion.