Superconducting qubits probe environmental defects such as non-equilibrium
quasiparticles, an important source of decoherence. We show that "hot"
non-equilibrium quasiparticles, with energies above the superconducting gap,
affect qubits differently from quasiparticles at the gap, implying qubits can
probe the dynamic quasiparticle energy distribution. For hot quasiparticles, we
predict a non-neligable increase in the qubit excited state probability P_e. By
injecting hot quasiparticles into a qubit, we experimentally measure an
increase of P_e in semi-quantitative agreement with the model and rule out the
typically assumed thermal distribution.Comment: Main paper: 5 pages, 5 figures. Supplement: 1 page, 1 figure, 1
table. Updated to user-prepared accepted version. Key changes: Supplement
added, Introduction rewritten, Figs.2,3,5 revised, Fig.4 adde