TY - JOUR T1 - Trapped electrons and ions as particle detectors JF - Phys. Rev. Lett. Y1 - 2021 A1 - Daniel Carney A1 - Hartmut Häffner A1 - David C. Moore A1 - J. M. Taylor AB -

Electrons and ions trapped with electromagnetic fields have long served as important high-precision metrological instruments, and more recently have also been proposed as a platform for quantum information processing. Here we point out that these systems can also be used as highly sensitive detectors of passing charged particles, due to the combination of their extreme charge-to-mass ratio and low-noise quantum readout and control. In particular, these systems can be used to detect energy depositions many orders of magnitude below typical ionization scales. As an illustration, we show that current devices can be used to provide competitive sensitivity to models where ambient dark matter particles carry small electric millicharges ≪e. Our calculations may also be useful in the characterization of noise in quantum computers coming from backgrounds of charged particles.

VL - 127 UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.05737 CP - 061804 U5 - https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.061804 ER -