I'm glad to have gotten the opportunity to think about and work on a fun experiment for the past few years. Here's my short version of the work (you can find the full manuscript at https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.12231 ) 1/n

So dark matter, it's there, here, everywhere and we have no idea what it is. One idea is that it's made of this wave-like stuff called axions (and lots of other ideas similar idea e.g. hidden photons). We can try to detect these waves via their interaction with light. 2/n

Under the right circumstances, the dark matter can turn into a quanta of light (a photon). We capture the photon in a shiny box so that we have enough time to to try to detect it. 3/n

Detecting single quanta of light is hard! A typical technique to doing this is to absorb the light and use it to generate some sort of measurable signal like a current or a change in resistance. We do things a bit differently. 4/n

We use a quantum bit (qubit). These devices are specifically engineered to interact with light. The remarkable aspect of this interaction is that you don't have to absorb the light in order to detect its presence. This will come in handy. 5/n

Once you have your qubit coupled to the light, you can selectively flip between the two states (up and down) of the qubit if and only if there is a quanta of light. Now the signal for detecting light is: did the qubit flip? 6/n

Things get a bit tricky because sometimes the qubit decides to flip even when there isn't any light around. And you really don't want to claim you've found the dark matter, when the qubit has just made a mistake. 7/n

This is where we use the fact that detecting the light does not require absorbing the light. So what we do is use the qubit to independently measure the same quanta of light multiple times. Now if the qubit makes the occasional mistake, it isn't a big deal. 8/n

The multiple measurements of the light allow us to do better than the typical detection strategy by a factor of ~1000. We put the detector to use looking for some hidden photon dark matter. Although we didn't find anything, it's the most sensitive search yet. 9/n

It has been really fun learning about and working at the intersection of two fields of physics (particle astrophysics and quantum computing). And we have more ideas that we're working on to make this type of detector even better!