Accelerating Surface Radiation Content to Investigate the Impact of Radon Progeny on Superconducting Qubits
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Quantum Physics arXiv:2606.00473 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 30 May 2026] Title:Accelerating Surface Radiation Content to Investigate the Impact of Radon Progeny on Superconducting Qubits Authors:Sagar S. Poudel, Dylan J. Temples, Ryan Linehan, Alejandro Rodriguez, Matthew Hall, Dax Kay, Nathaniel Rodenburg, Daniel Baxter, Enectali Figueroa-Feliciano, Richard W. Schnee, Lauren Hsu View a PDF of the paper titled Accelerating Surface Radiation Content to Investigate the Impact of Radon Progeny on Superconducting Qubits, by Sagar S. Poudel and Dylan J. Temples and Ryan Linehan and Alejandro Rodriguez and Matthew Hall and Dax Kay and Nathaniel Rodenburg and Daniel Baxter and Enectali Figueroa-Feliciano and Richard W. Schnee and Lauren Hsu View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Ionizing radiation in the form of $\alpha$, $\beta$, $\gamma$, and additional high-energy particles can induce decoherence via phonon and quasiparticle poisoning in superconducting qubits. Recent studies have explored this effect using cosmic rays or controlled radioactive sources held in the proximity of a qubit package, and have concluded that reductions in such ``external'' environmental radiation may benefit stable operation of qubit devices. However, the effect of long-lived, unstable daughters of $^{222}$Rn that ``plate out'' directly on device and packaging surfaces has not been as extensively explored. This plate-out process, well-known to the dark matter direct detection field, occurs throughout the fabrication and testing lifecycle of a device and (separately) its packaging, and produces a local source of $\alpha$-decays which can remain active for decades. As this scales with chip area, understanding and managing this source of ionizing radiation is relevant for successfully scaling quantum computing architectures to larger numbers of qubits in a radiation-robust way. We present a setup capable of accelerating and enhancing radon daughter plateout by a factor of $7\times10^4$ over ambient, in order to study, \textit{in situ}, the impact of these events on superconducting qubits. We also provide outlook on the potential impact of this source of ionizing radiation on current and future qubit arrays. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det) Report number: FERMILAB-PUB-26-0276-ETD-PPD Cite as: arXiv:2606.00473 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2606.00473v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.00473 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Dylan Temples [view email] [v1] Sat, 30 May 2026 01:39:47 UTC (8,531 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Accelerating Surface Radiation Content to Investigate the Impact of Radon Progeny on Superconducting Qubits, by Sagar S. Poudel and Dylan J. 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