Detection of hidden photon dark matter using the direct excitation of transmon qubits

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Overview

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) µeV, 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 ɛ~10^ {-13}-10^{-12} (where ɛ is the kinetic mixing parameter of the hidden
photon) with a few tens of seconds using a single standard transmon qubit. A simple extension to the frequency-tunable SQUID-based transmon enables the mass scan to cover the range of 4-40 µeV (1-10 GHz) within a reasonable length of run time. The scheme has great potential to extend the sensitivity towards various directions including being incorporated into the cavity-based haloscope experiments or the currently available multi-bit Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computer machines.

Based on:
S. Chen, H. Fukuda, T. Inada, T. Moroi, T. Nitta, T. Sichanugrist, Detection of hidden photon dark matter using the direct excitation of transmon qubits, arXiv: 2212.03884 [hep-ph]