Jess Riedel, IBM
Abstract
Although many pieces of astrophysical and cosmological evidence about the nature of dark matter have been collected, its direct detection has eluded experimental searches despite extensive effort. If the mass of dark matter is below 1 MeV, it is essentially imperceptible to conventional detection methods because negligible energy is transferred to nuclei during collisions. I propose directly detecting dark matter through the quantum decoherence it causes rather than its classical effects such as recoil or ionization. I show that quantum spatial superpositions are sensitive to low-mass dark matter which is inaccessible to classical techniques. This provides new independent motivation for the experimental pursuit of macroscopic superpositions, which have recently seen rapid progress. More generally, this method enables the detection of hypothetical new phenomena which have no classical influence on normal matter whatsoever, which might have applications in unrelated fields.