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 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 4−40μeV (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.
@article{arxiv.2212.03884,
title = {Detection of hidden photon dark matter using the direct excitation of transmon qubits},
author = {Shion Chen and Hajime Fukuda and Toshiaki Inada and Takeo Moroi and Tatsumi Nitta and Thanaporn Sichanugrist},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.03884},
year = {2023}
}