We look out into the Universe and gaze at an endless sea of galaxies, hundreds of billions of them, each containing hundreds of billions of stars. Yet all these structures that we see are but the tip of the iceberg. Our Universe is a strange place, dominated by unseen substances we call dark matter and dark energy. What are they, and how does this all work?
These are the fundamental motivations of our research. We know the standard model of particle physics is not complete. Although the standard model has been fantastically successful, it does not explain dark matter, dark energy, why neutrinos have mass, or how gravitation works. Finding what lies beyond the standard model is one of the greatest challenges in physics today. We approach this challenge by looking in two of the places we know the standard model fails: in dark matter and in neutrinos. We aim to find evidence for dark matter and elucidate its properties, and to look for new species of neutrinos through as-yet-unobserved interaction channels.
Our technology has been bases on cryogenic superconducting detectors. We are now working on transmon-based quantum detection. Can qubits acts as particle sensors? On the other hand, radiation and cosmic rays pose a serious obstacle to large-qubit superconducting quantum computers. Energetic photons and particles can deposit large amounts of energy in a qubit chip, leading to significant decoherence of the system. Our work in understanding and modeling the interaction between superconducting qubits and their environment is a two-way street: we can design qubits to be very sensitive particle detectors, or we can turn the knob the other way and design qubits that are very insensitive to their environment, thus improving their coherence and making better quantum computers.
