YQI Colloquium - David Moore - Yale

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. 

 

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