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Welcome underground. Go ahead and come out of the elevator here. These are all experiments studying the behavior of systems in low background environments because we're underground where all of that rock overhead is shielding out those cosmic rays. The main one of these that we're going to talk about today though is this facility called Quiet. So a quantum sensor is basically a sensor that is sensitive to things we want to measure like temperature, pressure, magnetic field, energy that is not possible with like traditional classical sensors and it uses these quantum technology and quantum systems like atoms to measure those.
We have implemented quantum sensors already in a lot of areas. The atomic clocks used in GPS systems that use cesium and rubidium atoms. Those give you precision that's not achievable with like classical clocks. Zoom into atoms, right? So think about atoms when you think of quantum systems and think about these atomic levels and think about excitations in these atomic levels that give you information about the environment that these atoms are interacting with and this allows you to extract information by looking at their atomic excitations. The basic goal of every
quantum sensor is to measure a quantum state and so we have qubit-based superconducting qubit-based quantum sensors. It's kind of packaged inside this copper foil neatly here. But this is kind of like housed in this dilution refrigerator. So this is this thing cools very you know at like temperature of like a few mili kelvin that's super close to absolute zero. Here is a qubit device that we're trying to develop into dark matter detector that will be highly sensitive to super light dark matter particle. All of these materials, the aluminum in this frame,
the copper in these plates, the material in this magnetic shield is naturally radioactive. And as that radioactive material decays, it emits particles. And those particles will move through space, for example, from a decay over here, travel through space, and some of them will hit our chip. And when they hit our chip, they deposit a small amount of energy. And that interaction in the chip is actually an interaction that the quantum system on that chip has with its environment. One of the main things that we want to study in our lab is how to protect quantum sensors or quantum systems from environmental noise. This is important
both for quantum computing but also for making low background sensors for particle physics. You can do it through hardware engineering and design of the qubit circuit itself or you can do it through environmental engineering going underground for example to remove environmental cosmic rays. Shielding the environment with good thermalization and copper wrap like you can see right here or magnetic shielding like you can see with this top lid right here that isolates the quantum system from electromagnetic fields in its environment. We want to understand
the interactions of a quantum system with its environment in the most controlled way possible. Whereas when we come down here, we can really do careful environmental engineering in a unique environment only available to us at Fermilab. Having a surface facility that is identical to something like this is really neat thing in terms of a comparative study. You could put the same qubit device underground and above ground and look at how the environment itself actually affects its performance given everything else is the same. And on top of that,
this expertise in particle physics is exactly the reason why the quantum ecosystem needs Fermilab's contribution because the problems facing quantum computing are interdisciplinary, fundamentally. They involve condensed matter. They involve particle physics. We are bringing that particle physics perspective, working with American industry, working with other national labs and working with universities to tackle these problems and solve it so that we can advance quantum computing for society and so that we can develop these novel quantum sensors to tackle
these fundamental problems in particle physics that classical sensors haven't been able to crack.
