We propose a novel dark matter detection method utilizing the excitation of superconducting transmon qubits. Assuming the hidden photon dark matter of a mass of $O(10)\mathrm{\mu }\mathrm{eV}$, the classical wave-matter oscillation induces an effective ac electric field via the small kinetic mixing with the ordinary photon. This serves as a coherent drive field for a qubit when it is resonant, evolving it from the ground state towards the first-excited state. We evaluate the rate of such evolution and observable excitations in the measurements, as well as the search sensitivity to the hidden photon dark matter. For a selected mass, one can reach $\epsilon \sim {10}^{-13}–{10}^{-12}$ (where $\epsilon$ is the kinetic mixing parameter of the hidden photon) with a few tens of seconds using a single standard transmon qubit. A simple extension to the frequency-tunable SQUID-based transmon enables the mass scan to cover the range of $4–40\mathrm{\mu }\mathrm{eV}$ (1–10 GHz) within a reasonable length of run time. The scheme has great potential to extend the sensitivity towards various directions including being incorporated into the cavity-based haloscope experiments or the currently available multibit noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computer machines.

• Received 14 December 2022
• Revised 13 June 2023
• Accepted 30 October 2023

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.211001

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Published by the American Physical Society