Recent advances in quantum sensing and computational technologies indicate the possibility of improving the precision of measurements aimed at detecting cosmological particles and weakly interacting massive particles using various qubit platforms. While recent progress has been made, mitigating environmental noise remains a challenge in extracting particle parameters with high fidelity. Addressing these challenges requires efforts on two levels. At the device level, the qubit and its array acting as a probe must be isolated from electrical and magnetic noise through optimized device geometry. At the signal processing level, it is necessary to develop filtering methods targeting specific noise spectra based on different qubit architectures. In this work, we explore the possibility of using semiconductor quantum dot spin qubits as a platform to search for quantum chromodynamics (QCD) axions and, more broadly, axion-like particles. Starting by deriving an effective Hamiltonian for electron–axion interactions, we identify an axion-induced effective magnetic field and determine the characteristic axion oscillation frequency. To suppress charge noise in the devices and environmental noise, we first analyze the charge noise spectrum and then develop a dedicated filtering and noise-reduction protocol, paving the way for exploring feasible axion mass ranges. Our preliminary study holds promise for enhancing the screening of various axion signals using quantum technologies. We expect that our analysis and filtering protocol can help advance the use of semiconductor quantum dot spin qubit arrays in axion detection.
Recent advances in quantum sensing and computational technologies indicate the possibility of improving the precision of measurements aimed at detecting cosmological particles and weakly interacting massive particles using various qubit platforms. While recent progress has been made, mitigating environmental noise remains a challenge in extracting particle parameters with high fidelity. Addressing these challenges requires efforts on two levels. At the device level, the qubit and its array acting as a probe must be isolated from electrical and magnetic noise through optimized device geometry. At the signal processing level, it is necessary to develop filtering methods targeting specific noise spectra based on different qubit architectures. In this work, we explore the possibility of using semiconductor quantum dot spin qubits as a platform to search for quantum chromodynamics (QCD) axions and, more broadly, axion-like particles. Starting by deriving an effective Hamiltonian for electron–axion interactions, we identify an axion-induced effective magnetic field and determine the characteristic axion oscillation frequency. To suppress charge noise in the devices and environmental noise, we first analyze the charge noise spectrum and then develop a dedicated filtering and noise-reduction protocol, paving the way for exploring feasible axion mass ranges. Our preliminary study holds promise for enhancing the screening of various axion signals using quantum technologies. We expect that our analysis and filtering protocol can help advance the use of semiconductor quantum dot spin qubit arrays in axion detection.
We propose a phase-coherent, narrowband magnetometer for searching couplings between axions or axion-like particles (ALPs) and electron spins, using gate-defined silicon quantum-dot spin qubits. With repeated Ramsey echo sequences and dispersive readout, the qubit precession response can be tracked with sub-Hz spectral resolution. The accessible axion mass window is determined using a series of filtering protocols that take into account sensing noise, including readout errors and 1/f noise. We demonstrate clear evidence of sidereal modulation of the signal due to Earth's rotation, while Earth's orbital motion produces an annual amplitude envelope that generates sidebands at fixed frequency spacing ±Ω⊕ around the sidereal component. For axion masses between 1-10μeV, the proposed method covers axion-electron coupling strengths gae ranging from 10−14 to 10−10. Including both daily and annual modulation patterns in the likelihood analysis enhances the rejection of stationary or instrumental noise. Our results indicate that spin-qubit magnetometry can achieve sensitivities approaching those suggested by astrophysical considerations, providing a complementary, laboratory-based probe of axion-electron interactions. Although we focus on silicon spin-qubit architectures, the approach is broadly applicable to spin-based quantum sensors.
Searches for axion and axionlike dark matter based on solid-state spin qubits are fundamentally limited by strong longitudinal dephasing, which rapidly suppresses the sensitivity gains offered by entanglement. Here we show that quantum error correction (QEC) can substantially enhance axion search sensitivity in realistic semiconductor spin qubit platforms by mitigating this dominant noise source. By integrating an optimally chosen repetition code QEC with logical GHZ block entanglement, we derive closed-form expressions for the quantum Fisher information that explicitly incorporate the finite coherence time of the axion field. Our analysis demonstrates that modest QEC cycle frequencies are sufficient to significantly reduce the effective dephasing rate, thereby restoring a broad parameter regime in which entanglement-enhanced sensing surpasses the standard quantum limit. Projecting these results onto CMOS-compatible device parameters, we find that QEC-protected entangled sensing can revive otherwise inaccessible quantum advantages, yielding up to order-of-magnitude improvements in sensitivity to the axion-electron coupling gae. These results establish a practical and theoretically controlled pathway for using QEC to improve qubit array searches for physics beyond the Standard Model.
The axion, a pseudoscalar particle originally introduced by Peccei, Quinn, Weinberg, and Wilczek to solve the "strong CP problem", is a well motivated dark-matter candidate with a mass lying in a broad range from peV to few meV. The last decade witnessed an increasing interest in axions and axion-like particles with many theoretical works published and many new experimental proposals. A major challenge for cosmological-axion discovery is the detection of the faint signal expected in detectors with power as low as a fraction of yoctowatt corresponding to a single microwave photon per minute. Early experiments used GaAs field-effect-transistors as well as pioneering technology such as Rydberg-atom single-photon detection. In the attempt of reducing the noise temperature superconductive devices were soon introduced. Microstrip SQUID Amplifiers allowed SQUIDs to operate at frequencies of a few GHz with a noise temperature reaching the standard quantum limit. Josephson Parametric Amplifiers have been recently employed extending the search to higher frequency while boradband Traveling Wave Parametric Amplifiers are now under study. The ultimate sensitivity, beyond the quantum limit, is however expected from single microwave-photon detectors. Solutions for quantum sensing include quantum non-demolition measurements and switching detectors based on superconducting qubits and hot-electron detectors. A further improvement in signal sensitivity and noise reduction is expected exploiting arrays of superconducting qubits as proposed by the SUPERGALAX project.
The growing interest in quantum computers has triggered various approaches for the realization of a large-scale quantum processor that can eventually outperform classical high-performance computers. Quantum computers are attracting increasing attention for their potential to enormously accelerate the simulation of quantum systems and the solution of optimization problems, promising an immense impact, particularly in fields such as chemistry, medicine, and cybersecurity. Although it is still a long way to a practical quantum device, the progress over the last decades has shown encouraging results for a so far limited number of quantum bits, or qubits for short, which represent the computational units of the processor. One promising platform for the implementation of qubits is the spin of charge carriers in semiconductor quantum dots. Especially the use of purified silicon as a host material has significantly improved the performance of quantum operations. Advanced fabrication techniques from the established semiconductor industry in principle allow for the manufacturing of a large number of qubits on a small chip, making them specifically competitive from the perspective of scalability. In this thesis, we investigate challenges for electron spin qubits, particularly in the context of scaling to large qubit arrays for quantum computation. We evaluate the performance of quantum gates, present error mitigation strategies, and propose new quantum operations for two particular spin qubit implementations. In a dense array of Loss-DiVincenzo spin qubits on a chip, quantum information can be electrically controlled by microwave pulses. For neighboring qubits, capacitive couplings of nearby electrodes lead to crosstalk that affects the quantum computation. The first examination in this thesis addresses the effect of crosstalk on idling and operating spin qubits due to an interfering microwave drive. After the analysis and characterization of the performance, we suggest mitigation protocols for different constellations of important quantum gates, which can be easily implemented experimentally. We further show how to reduce crosstalk in a two-qubit gate using an asymmetric driving scheme, resulting in an enormous improvement of the gate performance, and may be used to generally overcome the obstacle of crosstalk. An additional source of errors in spin qubit registers originates from the finite residual exchange interaction between neighboring qubits. It arises due to a finite overlap of the electron wave functions and is caused by the limited speed at which the applied voltages can be controlled. We evaluate the fidelity of doing quantum operations under these circumstances with a varying number of neighboring qubits and present robust mitigation schemes with a decent performance also in the presence of noise. Besides crosstalk, another crucial observation in experiments using microwaves is the heating caused by the delivery of high-power radio frequency pulses to the quantum chip and results in a change of the qubit properties. We therefore investigate the impact of phonons on the energy levels in spin qubits to identify a temperature-dependent correction to the qubit state splitting. As microwave pulses are associated with potential errors, exchange-only qubits represent a promising alternative to achieve universal quantum computation only using baseband control. Therefore, we shift our focus towards exchange-only qubits and outline the main error sources in these systems, including residual exchange interactions between spins, charge noise from the applied voltages, and magnetic fluctuations in the material. A consequential complication of this implementation is that the quantum information can leak out of the qubit states. This effect, however, can be reduced in the presence of a finite magnetic field, as we will demonstrate in this thesis. The gate construction for exchange-only qubits usually requires more pulse steps than in the previous qubit type. Nevertheless, if exchange interactions are switched on simultaneously, this can result in faster quantum gates, as we demonstrate in this thesis. Especially the discovery of a quantum operation that introduces relative phases between computational and leakage states can be of interest for the construction of two-qubit gates and will be discussed in an example for a special operation space.
Spin qubits in gate-defined semiconductor quantum dots are a promising platform for realising a scalable quantum computer. This platform encodes quantum information into the intrinsic angular momentum (spin) of individual electrons or holes. In particular, hole spins in quantum dots enable the possibility of all-electrical spin control due to their intrinsic spin-orbit coupling. One important criterion of a quantum computer is the ability to reliably read out the state of the qubit. This is done by mapping spin information to the charge degree of freedom, combined with a method for charge detection. Charge detection can be facilitated by coupling a resonator directly to the quantum dot gate or to a charge sensor and measuring the resonator's phase or amplitude response. In this thesis, we describe a set of experiments relating to the implementation of hole spin qubit readout with superconducting resonators. First, we study gate-based charge sensing in a Si fin field-effect transistor (finFET) device using a superconducting NbN nanowire resonator. We find that the resonator amplifies capacitive crosstalk when electrical control pulses are applied to gate electrodes in this device. This occurs whenever a spectral component of qubit control pulses overlaps with the resonance frequency, which we show may occur for both baseband and radio-frequency (RF) drive signals. We quantify this crosstalk in a transport-based method, and attribute its source to the capacitance between the bondpads of neighbouring gate electrodes. In a second experiment, we use an RF charge sensor with the same nanowire technology to read out hole spin qubits formed in the quantum well of a Ge/SiGe heterostructure. A screening layer approach is used to facilitate RF matching due to large RF dissipation found in the heterostructure. We implement a double-latched readout scheme in this system to reduce errors arising from both spin and charge decay during readout. The spin-to-charge conversion process and its dependence on magnetic field orientation is studied. Spin and charge decay processes arising after spin-to-charge conversion are mitigated by choosing an optimal working point for the field orientation, field amplitude and readout pulse times. By doing so, we achieve an average single-shot state-preparation-and-measurement fidelity of 97%, primarily bounded by imperfect state preparation and limited signal-to-noise ratio. Finally, we study coplanar waveguide resonators fabricated from NbN. We investigate the feasibility of integrating this type of resonator onto the same chip as the Si finFET quantum dots. We then develop a novel resonator readout technique by the interference of two microwave sidebands. We demonstrate the insensitivity of this technique to common-mode phase and amplitude noise both theoretically and experimentally. This technique is then used to study resonator noise arising from two-level system defects. These results highlight both the practical constraints and the potential for achieving high readout fidelities using resonator-based hole spin qubit readout. This work establishes a blueprint for mitigating resonator-induced crosstalk and enabling high-fidelity readout in lossy materials by incorporating a screening layer.
We propose a quantum sensor network for direct detection of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) axion dark matter using entangled superconducting qubits. In the presence of a static magnetic field, the oscillating axion field induces a coherent qubit rotation described by an encoding angle proportional to the axion-photon coupling and an unknown dark-matter phase. Treating the phase as an additional unknown parameter turns axion detection into a two-parameter quantum estimation problem. We formulate these signals in Cartesian coordinates, thereby avoiding the singularity that arises in the weak-signal regime and establishing a regular framework for multiparameter quantum estimation. Using this framework, we optimize the quantum sensor network and combine it with Bayesian inference to reconstruct the axion-photon coupling. The optimized protocol accurately recovers the KSVZ and DFSZ benchmark couplings over the mass range ma∈[0.1,10]μeV, generalizes to previously unseen masses, and remains robust against realistic superconducting-qubit decoherence and gate errors.