Exploiting quantum interference of charge carriers, epitaxial graphene grown on silicon carbide emerges as a game-changing platform for ultra-sensitive bolometric sensing, featuring an intrinsic resistive thermometer response unmatched by any other graphene variant. By achieving low and uniform carrier densities, we have accessed a new regime of strong charge localization that dramatically reduces thermal conductance, significantly enhancing bolometer performance. Here we present scalable graphene-based bolometers engineered for detecting GHz-range photons, a frequency domain essential for superconducting quantum processors. Our devices deliver a state-of-the-art noise equivalent power of 40 zW/Hz at T=40mK, enabled by the steep temperature dependence of thermal conductance, Gth∼T4 for T<100mK. These results establish epitaxial graphene bolometers as versatile and low-back-action detectors, unlocking new possibilities for next-generation quantum processors and pioneering investigations into the thermodynamics and thermalization pathways of strongly entangled quantum systems.
@article{arxiv.2505.24564,
title = {Quantum-Ready Microwave Detection with Scalable Graphene Bolometers in the Strong Localization Regime},
author = {Yu-Cheng Chang and Federico Chianese and Naveen Shetty and Johanna Huhtasaari and Aditya Jayaraman and Joonas T. Peltonen and Samuel Lara-Avila and Bayan Karimi and Andrey Danilov and Jukka P. Pekola and Sergey Kubatkin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.24564},
year = {2025}
}