Fermilab Physicist Wins DOE Award for First Entangled Dark Matter Sensing Test

The U.S. Department of Energy announced on October 8 that Rakshya Khatiwada of Fermilab and Illinois Institute of Technology won a DOE Early Career Award to build a four-qubit entangled quantum sensing system for dark matter searches. The experiment will test whether entanglement offers a measurable advantage over classical instruments.

• DOE Early Career Award announced on October 8, 2026
• Four-qubit entangled system will target axions and dark photons
• Entanglement could scale signal as N² instead of 1/√N
• LUX-ZEPLIN and XENONnT have yet to detect WIMP particles