Directional search for light dark matter with quantum sensors

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.