Speaker
Description
In the last decade, the sensitivity of superconducting athermal phonon detectors has improved by nearly two orders of magnitude, driven largely by the scientific need to search for dark matter with smaller masses and thus smaller energy depositions. Though these detectors are fabricated using nearly identical materials and fabrication techniques as those used for superconducting qubits, they have been purposefully optimized to maximize sensitivity to athermal phonons within the substrate; the exact opposite design goal to that of computation qubits, where one tries to absolutely minimize environmental coupling. This orthogonal optimization makes superconducting athermal phonon detectors an extremely valuable complementary tool to understand the source of quasi-particle poisoning in qubits. In this talk, we'll present studies trying to characterize the source of non-ionizing phonon burst backgrounds seen in these detectors and compare and contrast these results to studies characterizing non-ionizing burst backgrounds in computational qubits.
