Directional search for light dark matter with quantum sensors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantum sensor-based method to determine the velocity and direction of wave-like dark matter, enhancing detection capabilities by utilizing phase differences between sensors without compromising sensitivity.

Contribution

It presents a novel measurement protocol that extracts directional information from quantum sensors, applicable to various dark matter detectors without requiring specific experimental setups.

Findings

The method effectively retrieves dark matter wind direction and velocity.

It maintains the sensitivity of existing dark matter detectors.

It outperforms classical correlation-based methods.

Abstract

The presence of dark matter (DM) stands as one of the most compelling indications of new physics in particle physics. Typically, the detection of wave-like DM involves quantum sensors, such as qubits or cavities. The phase of the sensors is usually discarded as the value of the phase itself is not physically meaningful. However, the difference of the phase between the sensors contains the information of the velocity and direction of the DM wind. We propose a measurement protocol to extract this information from the sensors using quantum states. Our method does not require specific experimental setups and can be applied to any type of DM detector as long as the data from the detectors can be taken quantum mechanically. We also show that our method does not spoil the sensitivity of the DM detectors and is superior to the classical method based on the correlations of the DM signals between the detectors.