Speaker
Description
Superconducting quantum devices (SQDs) are at the forefront of technologies to investigate scientific phenomena such as dark matter and application spaces such as quantum computing. The performance of SQDs is affected by correlated events that are produced by naturally occurring radiation. These events deposit energy into materials, including substrates, which produce secondary particles from atomic and nuclear processes and tertiary particles such as phonons and particle-hole pairs. These tertiary particles can produce quasiparticles, which affect the SQDs. Due to the sensitive nature of the SQDs, differences in energy and spatial distributions from secondary and tertiary particles within the substrate may have a large impact on SQD performance. The energy and spatial distributions are governed by the physics processes from the primary radiation in the material and subsequent processes that govern the production and transport of secondary and tertiary particles. An important approach to understanding the performance of SQDs is the use of simulation toolkits such as Geant4. We will present results from Geant4 simulations of the effects of the various physics processes. We will discuss needs and issues regarding data libraries to improve the confidence is simulation results.
This work performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344