Noah Alexander Kurinsky [Stanford University]

Abstract: 

As quantum processors have become a reality in industry, coherence times have not sustained the meteoric rise that led to much of the initial investment. The maturing infrastructure around qubits, and in particular superconducting quantum computing, has allowed for more robust studies of when and how the environment conspires to destroy individual quantum states or even decohere entire QPUs through correlated heating events. The mechanisms that cause spontaneous coherence reduction, sudden TLS tuning shifts, and sporadic charge errors, are the same mechanisms we have been using for decades to produce particle detectors. The big difference is that the energy scale that qubits operate at, and their sensitivity to very small energy injections, makes them uniquely sensitive instruments to study these mechanisms at much lower energies than conventional detectors.

In this talk, I will discuss the work the DMQIS group at SLAC/Stanford is doing at the interface of quantum computing and particle detection. Our goals include both mitigating qubit heating and sensing substrate heat pulses, as well as studying charge errors and sensing single charges in large volumes. In particular, I will focus on our main goal, which is to accelerate the search for dark matter and novel neutrino physics which would be manifest at energies in the 0.1 - 100 meV energy range, and on improving the resilience of qubits to a range of environmental effects.

Research Interests: 

Radiation effects on qubits, phonon sensing, THz photon detection