Structured Noise Floors in Quantum Detectors: An Empirical Study

We present an empirical study of noise floors in four independent quantum measurement systems: LIGO O3 gravitational wave strain, XENON1T electronic recoil data, HESS gamma-ray observations, and Fermi-LAT photon counts. In all four systems, the noise floor exhibits: (1) exponential temporal correlations with timescales from 16 ms to 2,784 s; (2) non-Gaussian statistics with excess kurtosis from -1.36 to +65.7; (3) rejection of the Shapiro-Wilk normality test at p < 1e-30. These properties contradict the standard assumption that detector noise is thermal, white, and Gaussian. Analysis code and data manifest: https://codeberg.org/badmeed/noise-floors