The 21st Patras Workshop will bring the international dark-matter community to Western Australia in November, with 2025 Nobel laureate John M. Martinis and a program showing how qubits, squeezing and single-photon detection are becoming tools for fundamental physics.

By Professor Michael E. Tobar

Most quantum technology stories start with a computer. In Perth this November, the question will be different: can the same superconducting circuits, quantum-limited amplifiers and single-photon detectors being developed for quantum information help find the invisible matter that dominates the mass of the Universe?

From 9–13 November 2026, The University of Western Australia (UWA) will host the 21st Patras Workshop on Axions, WIMPs and WISPs, one of the longest-running international meetings devoted to dark matter and other weakly interacting particles. A welcome reception will begin the meeting on 8 November. The Patras series started at CERN in 2005 and has since followed the changing landscape of dark-matter physics, from traditional WIMP searches to axions, dark photons and increasingly sophisticated quantum sensors. Conference website

For the quantum community, the timing is particularly interesting. Techniques developed to manipulate microwave photons and superconducting circuits are now being turned around and used as some of the most sensitive measurement tools available.

The quantum-dark matter crossover

Dark matter has not been easy to find. Decades of increasingly sensitive experiments have ruled out large regions of parameter space without producing a universally accepted detection. That has pushed experimentalists toward signals that are weaker, lower in energy and harder to distinguish from noise.

This is where quantum technology becomes useful.

Several presentations at Patras 2026 sit directly at the intersection of quantum information and particle physics. Aaron Chou of Fermilab will discuss a search for the QCD axion combining a tunable high-Q dielectric cavity with a qubit-based single microwave-photon counter. Rather than continuously amplifying a tiny microwave field, the idea is to count individual microwave photons generated in an axion detector.

Australia’s own ORGAN axion program, based at UWA and Swinburne University of Technology, is adopting a related approach. Its next-generation ORGAN-Q experiment is developing a squeezed-vacuum receiver designed to circumvent the standard quantum limit and increase the rate at which an axion detector can scan through possible particle masses. This quantum-enhanced technique was pioneered in axion searches by the HAYSTAC collaboration, which demonstrated that squeezed vacuum could broaden the useful measurement bandwidth and more than double the scan rate without sacrificing sensitivity.
For the first time in the ORGAN program, ORGAN-Q will also employ travelling-wave parametric amplifiers. These devices provide near-quantum-limited amplification over a much wider bandwidth than conventional resonant parametric amplifiers. By combining squeezed-vacuum techniques with broadband parametric amplification, ORGAN-Q aims to extend quantum-enhanced axion detection to higher microwave frequencies, where receiver noise and limited amplifier bandwidth become increasingly serious challenges.

The Patras program includes presentations on the DarkQuantum project, which is developing quantum-enhanced versions of the RADES axion haloscope. The project combines quantum-limited microwave amplification at lower frequencies with qubit-based single-photon detection at higher frequencies. Delegates will also hear about experiments that use superconducting qubits themselves as dark-matter detectors. In one approach being pursued in Japan, a hidden-photon dark-matter field can directly excite a tunable transmon qubit when the qubit frequency is brought into resonance with the dark-matter mass.

There are even proposals to borrow ideas from quantum error correction. One contribution explores error-correction-like techniques in arrays of quantum sensors to distinguish a coherent dark-matter signal from noise affecting individual sensors.

These are not quantum computers being asked to calculate the identity of dark matter. They are quantum devices being used as exquisitely sensitive physical instruments.

A Nobel connection that is more than ceremonial

The most prominent quantum connection at the meeting will be Professor John M. Martinis, one of the three recipients of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Martinis shared the prize with John Clarke and Michel H. Devoret for experiments demonstrating macroscopic quantum tunnelling and quantised energy levels in an electrical circuit. Those experiments established that engineered superconducting circuits could exhibit controllable quantum behaviour on a scale far larger than individual atoms, an idea that ultimately became central to superconducting quantum computing. Official Nobel Prize information

The connection to axion research is particularly direct. Fellow Nobel laureate John Clarke has worked with the Axion Dark Matter Experiment, ADMX, since the late 1990s, nearly three decades. Clarke and his Berkeley colleagues developed the microstrip SQUID amplifier that replaced the conventional transistor amplifier used in the experiment’s first-stage microwave receiver. By operating close to the quantum noise limit, the SQUID substantially reduced the receiver noise and allowed ADMX to detect much weaker microwave signals. The first ADMX search using this technology reported an approximately 100-fold improvement in scan rate and reached the sensitivity required to test realistic axion models.

The same superconducting-circuit physics that helped launch quantum computing also provided one of the key technologies that transformed ADMX into a substantially more sensitive dark-matter experiment.

Martinis will give a plenary lecture at Patras, and the program will also include a public lecture on quantum technology on Tuesday, 10 November, at UWA’s Octagon Theatre.

His presence is especially relevant because the boundary between quantum-computing hardware and precision fundamental-physics instrumentation is becoming increasingly blurred. Josephson junctions, transmons, parametric amplifiers, squeezed microwave states and cryogenic control electronics can all be components of a quantum processor, or of an experiment attempting to detect a particle that may interact with ordinary matter only extraordinarily weakly.

Not just axions

Despite the growing quantum emphasis, Patras remains a broad dark-sector meeting.

The program covers axions and other wave-like dark matter, WIMPs, dark photons, astrophysical searches, cosmology, theory and new experimental concepts.

Experiments represented in the accepted program range from cavity axion searches such as ADMX, HAYSTAC, MADMAX, QUAX, ORGAN, DALI and DMRadio to major rare-event detectors including XENONnT, LUX-ZEPLIN, SuperCDMS, TESSERACT, DarkSide and PandaX. Solar-axion searches, astrophysical observations and entirely new dark-matter models sit alongside them.
That diversity matters because there is still no experimental consensus about what dark matter is. A WIMP detector looking for nuclear recoils, a microwave cavity looking for an axion, and a qubit waiting for a single microwave excitation may all be investigating different parts of the same underlying problem.

Also, one of the useful features of Patras has always been that experimentalists and theorists working on quite different parts of the problem meet in a single-track workshop. That makes it easier to see where ideas from one area may be useful in another. The increasing use of quantum measurement techniques in dark-matter experiments is a good example of that exchange.

Why Perth?

Holding Patras in Perth also makes the meeting more accessible to researchers from the Asia-Pacific region. The programme includes strong participation from Australia, China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, alongside the established European and North American dark-matter communities.

UWA has a long history in precision measurement and cryogenic microwave physics, and Australia now hosts several complementary dark-matter programs. This Australian research program is funded by the Australian Research Council through the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics. ORGAN searches for axions using microwave resonators; SABRE South is being commissioned at the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory in Victoria; Australian researchers participate in major international direct-detection collaborations; and quantum sensing is increasingly being incorporated into experiments searching for physics beyond the Standard Model.

The choice of Perth therefore reflects a broader shift. Quantum technology is no longer confined to the race to build a useful quantum computer. Some of its most demanding applications are appearing in experiments where the objective is to measure something almost unimaginably small.

Dark matter may be the ultimate example.

From quantum devices to the dark sector

Nobody attending Patras expects one technology to solve the dark-matter problem by itself. The field has had too many null results for that kind of prediction.

What has changed is the experimental toolbox.

A superconducting circuit can now resolve individual microwave photons. Squeezed states can redistribute quantum noise. Parametric amplifiers can operate close to the quantum limit. Qubits can be used as detectors rather than computational elements. Large experiments can combine these devices with multi-tesla magnets, millikelvin cryogenics and high-Q resonators.

Patras 2026 will put many of those ideas in the same room.

For the quantum industry, that is worth watching. The next important use of quantum hardware may not only be calculating something that classical computers cannot. It may be measuring something that conventional instruments cannot see.

And somewhere inside that noise may be dark matter.

EVENT DETAILS 21st Patras Workshop on Axions, WIMPs and WISPs The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Perth Welcome reception: 8 November 2026 Workshop: 9–13 November 2026 Early-bird registration closes: 9 September 2026 Registration closes: 25 September 2026 https://indico.global/event/16402/