A qubit sensor with an electric dipole moment acquires an additional contribution to its depolarization rate when it is placed in the vicinity of a polar or dielectric material as a consequence of electrical noise arising from polarization fluctuations in the latter. Here, we characterize this relaxation rate as a function of experimentally tunable parameters such as sample-probe distance, probe-frequency, and temperature, and demonstrate that it offers a window into dielectric properties of insulating materials over a wide range of frequencies and length scales. We discuss the experimental feasibility of our proposal and illustrate its ability to probe a variety of phenomena, ranging from collective polar excitations to phase transitions and disorder-dominated physics in relaxor ferroelectrics. Our proposal paves the way for a novel table-top probe of polar and dielectric materials in a parameter regime complementary to existing tools and techniques.
@article{arxiv.2111.09315,
title = {Noise Electrometry of Polar and Dielectric Materials},
author = {Rahul Sahay and Pavel A. Volkov and Satcher Hsieh and Eric Parsonnet and Lane W. Martin and Ramamoorthy Ramesh and Norman Y. Yao and Shubhayu Chatterjee},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.09315},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
5 + 4 + 22 pages; 2 figures; v2: corrected formalism used to extract noise from TO phonon modes; conclusions unchanged