2022/12/07 by Chen, Shion, Fukuda, Hajime, Inada, Toshiaki +3
#Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2212.03884
We propose a novel dark matter detection method utilizing the excitation of superconducting transmon qubits. Assuming the hidden photon dark matter of a mass of O(10) μ\rm eV, the classical wave-matter oscillation induces an effective ac electric field via the small kinetic mixing with the ordinary photon. This serves as a coherent drive field for a qubit when it is resonant, evolving it from the ground state towards the first-excited state. We evaluate the rate of such evolution and observable excitations in the measurements, as well as the search sensitivity to the hidden photon dark matter. For a selected mass, one can reach ε∼ 10-12-10-14 (where ε is the kinetic mixing parameter of the hidden photon) with a single standard transmon qubit. A simple extension to the frequency-tunable SQUID-based transmon enables the mass scan to cover the whole 4-40 μ\rm eV (1-10 GHz) range within a reasonable length of run time. The sensitivity scalability along the number of the qubits also makes it a promising platform in accord to the rapid evolution of the superconducting quantum computer technology.