A Stress Induced Source of Phonon Bursts and Quasiparticle Poisoning
Abstract
The performance of superconducting qubits is degraded by a poorly characterized set of energy sources breaking the Cooper pairs responsible for superconductivity, creating a condition often called ``quasiparticle poisoning". Both superconducting qubits and low threshold dark matter calorimeters have observed excess bursts of quasiparticles or phonons that decrease in rate with time. Here, we show that a silicon crystal glued to its holder exhibits a rate of low-energy phonon events that is more than two orders of magnitude larger than in a functionally identical crystal suspended from its holder in a low-stress state. The excess phonon event rate in the glued crystal decreases with time since cooldown, consistent with a source of phonon bursts which contributes to quasiparticle poisoning in quantum circuits and the low-energy events observed in cryogenic calorimeters. We argue that relaxation of thermally induced stress between the glue and crystal is the source of these events.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2208.02790,
title = {A Stress Induced Source of Phonon Bursts and Quasiparticle Poisoning},
author = {Robin Anthony-Petersen and Andreas Biekert and Raymond Bunker and Clarence L. Chang and Yen-Yung Chang and Luke Chaplinsky and Eleanor Fascione and Caleb W. Fink and Maurice Garcia-Sciveres and Richard Germond and Wei Guo and Scott A. Hertel and Ziqing Hong and Noah Kurinsky and Xinran Li and Junsong Lin and Marharyta Lisovenko and Rupak Mahapatra and Adam Mayer and Daniel N. McKinsey and Siddhant Mehrotra and Nader Mirabolfathi and Brian Neblosky and William A. Page and Pratyush K. Patel and Bjoern Penning and H. Douglas Pinckney and Mark Platt and Matt Pyle and Maggie Reed and Roger K. Romani and Hadley Santana Queiroz and Bernard Sadoulet and Bruno Serfass and Ryan Smith and Peter F. Sorensen and Burkhant Suerfu and Aritoki Suzuki and Ryan Underwood and Vetri Velan and Gensheng Wang and Yue Wang and Samuel L. Watkins and Michael R. Williams and Volodymyr Yefremenko and Jianjie Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.02790},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
19 pages (main + supplementary), 6 figures. W. A. Page and R. K. Romani contributed equally to this work. Correspondence should be addressed to R. K. Romani