Chinese scientists create the world's first quantum sensor network

A team of Chinese scientists has created the world's first quantum sensor network designed to detect dark matter, connecting laboratories in the eastern Chinese cities of Hefei and Hangzhou.

Published in Nature on Thursday, the research achieved unprecedented sensitivity in searching for signals of axions which is a candidate of hypothetical particles that might comprise the universe's "missing mass. The scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China deployed five synchronized sensors across both cities.

This distributed approach filters local interference by requiring signals to appear simultaneously at multiple sites. Though no definitive dark matter encounter was recorded during two months of observation, the team established the strictest constraints yet on axion-nucleon coupling across an axion mass range, surpassing astronomical observations by up to 40 times in part of that certain range.