Event time:
Friday, May 5, 2023 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Audience:
YQI Researchers
Location:
YQI Seminar Room & Zoom
Event description:
Sources of athermal phonons in cryogenic detectors
Particle interactions, stress-induced fractures, or other non-thermal events in a substrate can create bursts of phonons that break Cooper pairs in superconducting films on the substrate surface. Recent work has studied these events as a possible source of correlated errors in arrays of superconducting qubits. However, such athermal-phonon mediated events have also been used for several decades as a tool for particle detection, in particular for searches for rare events such as dark matter scattering in terrestrial detectors. I will give an overview of what is known about athermal-phonon mediated energy depositions in superconductors from the dark matter detection community, the dominant sources of such phonons, and possible mitigations for superconducting qubit applications.
Livestream the event here (Yale login required)