The transport of quantum information between different nodes of a quantum device is among the challenging functionalities of a quantum processor. In the context of spin qubits, this requirement can be met by coherent electron spin shuttling between semiconductor quantum dots. Here we theoretically study a minimal version of spin shuttling between two quantum dots. To this end, we analyze the dynamics of an electron during a detuning sweep in a silicon double quantum dot (DQD) occupied by one electron. Possibilities and limitations of spin transport are investigated. Spin-orbit interaction and the Zeeman effect in an inhomogeneous magnetic field play an important role for spin shuttling and are included in our model. Interactions that couple the position, spin and valley degrees of freedom open a number of avoided crossings in the spectrum allowing for diabatic transitions and interfering paths. The outcomes of single and repeated spin shuttling protocols are explored by means of numerical simulations and an approximate analytical model based on the solution of the Landau--Zener problem. We find that a spin infidelity as low as $1-F_s\lesssim 0.002$ with a relatively fast level velocity of $α= 600\, μ$eV/ns is feasible for optimal choices of parameters or by making use of constructive interference.
Control of entanglement between qubits at distant quantum processors using a two-qubit gate is an essential function of a scalable, modular implementation of quantum computation. Among the many qubit platforms, spin qubits in silicon quantum dots are promising for large-scale integration along with their nanofabrication capability. However, linking distant silicon quantum processors is challenging as two-qubit gates in spin qubits typically utilize short-range exchange coupling, which is only effective between nearest-neighbor quantum dots. Here we demonstrate a two-qubit gate between spin qub…
Significant advances have been made towards fault-tolerant operation of silicon spin qubits, with single qubit fidelities exceeding 99.9%, several demonstrations of two-qubit gates based on exchange coupling, and the achievement of coherent single spin-photon coupling. Coupling arbitrary pairs of spatially separated qubits in a quantum register poses a significant challenge as most qubit systems are constrained to two dimensions (2D) with nearest neighbor connectivity. For spins in silicon, new methods for quantum state transfer should be developed to achieve connectivity beyond nearest-neighb…
Shuttling of single electrons in gate-defined silicon quantum dots is numerically simulated. A minimal gate geometry without explicit tunnel barrier gates is introduced, and used to define a chain of accumulation mode quantum dots, each controlled by a single gate voltage. One-dimensional potentials are derived from a three-dimensional electrostatic model, and used to construct an effective Hamiltonian for efficient simulation. Control pulse sequences are designed by maintaining a fixed adiabaticity, so that different shuttling conditions can be systematically compared. We first use these tool…
We investigate superradiant-like dynamics of the nuclear-spin bath in a single-electron quantum dot, by considering electrons cyclically shuttling on/off an isotopically enriched `nuclear-spin island'. Assuming a uniform hyperfine interaction, we discuss in detail the nuclear spin evolution under shuttling and its relation to superradiance. We derive the minimum shuttling time which allows to escape the adiabatic spin evolution. Furthermore, we discuss slow/fast shuttling under the inhomogeneous field of a nearby micromagnet. Finally, by comparing our scheme to a model with stationary quantum …
In semiconductor spin qubits which typically interact through short-range exchange coupling, shuttling of spin is a practical way to generate quantum operations between distant qubits. Although the exchange is often tunable through voltages applied to gate electrodes, its minimal value can be significantly large, which hinders the applicability of existing shuttling protocols to such devices, requiring a different approach. In this work, we extend our previous results for double- and triple-dot systems, and describe a method for implementing spin shuttling in long chains of quantum dots in a n…
We study the shuttling instability in an array of three quantum dots the central one of which is movable. We extend the results by Armour and MacKinnon on this problem to a broader parameter regime. The results obtained by an efficient numerical method are interpreted directly using the Wigner distributions. We emphasize that the instability should be viewed as a crossover phenomenon rather than a clear-cut transition.
Small spin-qubit registers defined by single electrons confined in Si/SiGe quantum dots operate successfully and connecting these would permit scalable quantum computation. Shuttling the qubit carrying electrons between registers is a natural choice for high-fidelity coherent links provided the overhead of control signals stays moderate. Our proof-of-principle demonstrates shuttling of a single electron by a propagating wave-potential in an electrostatically defined 420 nm long Si/SiGe quantum-channel. This conveyor-mode shuttling approach requires independent from its length only four sinusoi…
Current-voltage characteristics of a spintromechanical device, in which spin-polarized electrons tunnel between magnetic leads with anti-parallel magnetization through a single level movable quantum dot, are calculated. New exchange- and electromechanical coupling-induced (spin-polaronic) effects that determine strongly nonlinear current-voltage characteristics were found. In the low-voltage regime of electron transport the voltage-dependent and exchange field-induced displacement of quantum dot towards the source electrode leads to nonmonotonic behavior of differential conductance that demons…
Large spin shuttling oscillations enabling high-fidelity single qubit gates
Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH（于利希研究中心）；University of Cologne（科隆大学）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）；Università di Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；ARQUE Systems GmbH（ARQUE系统有限公司）
Prospects for the quantum control of electrons in the silicon quantum computer architecture are considered theoretically. In particular, we investigate the feasibility of shuttling donor-bound electrons between the impurity in the bulk and the Si-SiO2 interface by tuning an external electric field. We calculate the shuttling time to range from sub-picoseconds to nanoseconds depending on the distance (~ 10-50 nm) of the donor from the interface. Our results establish that quantum control in such nanostructure architectures could, in principle, be achieved.
We consider electromechanical properties of a single-electronic device consisting of movable quantum dot attached to a vibrating cantilever, forming a tunnel contact with a non-movable source electrode. We show that the resonance Kondo tunneling of electrons amplify exponentially the strength of nanoelectromechanical (NEM) coupling in such device and makes the latter to be insensitive to mesoscopic fluctuations of electronic levels in a nano-dot. It is also shown that the study of Kondo-NEM phenomenon provides an additional (as compared with a standard conductance measurements in a non-mechani…
Shuttle-like mechanism of electron transport through a single level vibrating quantum dot is considered in the regime of strong electromechanical coupling. It is shown that the increment of shuttle instability is a nonmonotonic function of the driving voltage. The interplay of two oppositely acting effects - vibron-assisted electron tunneling and polaronic blockade - results in oscillations of the increment on the energy scale of vibron energy.
Confinement drives valley splitting above 4K in buried silicon quantum wells
QuTech and Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学奎克研究所与卡弗里纳米科学研究所）；Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校物理系）
Long-distance fast and precise transfer of charge in semiconductor nanostructures is one of the goals for scalable electronic devices. We study theoretically the control of shuttling of an electron along a linear chain of semiconductor electrostatically-defined quantum dots by an electric field pulse with nonlinear time-dependent profile. We show that this essential nonlinearity along with shortcuts to adiabaticity techniques speed up the electron transfer with high fidelity, while still holding great robustness under spin-flip interactions and inhomogeneities in the couplings of the chain. A …
With silicon being the go-to material for spin qubits, and motivated by the demand of a scalable quantum computer architecture for fast and reliable quantum information transfer on-chip, we study coherent electron transport in a silicon double quantum dot. We first examine the valley-orbital dynamics in a silicon double dot, and discuss how to properly measure the tunnel couplings as well as the valley phase difference between two quantum dots. We then focus on possible phase and spin flip errors during spin transport across a silicon double dot. In particular, we clarify correction on the eff…
We present a theoretical study of time-dependent transport via a quantum shuttle within the non-equilibrium Green's function technique. An arbitrary voltage is applied to the tunnel junction and electrons in the leads are considered to be at zero temperature. The transient and the steady state behavior of the system is considered here in order to explore the quantum dynamics of the shuttle device as a function of time and applied bias. The properties of the phonon distribution of the oscillating dot coupled to the electrons are investigated using a non-perturbative approach. We derive a relati…
In bulk silicon, intervalley electronic interference has been shown to lead to strong oscillations in the exchange coupling between impurity electronic wavefunctions, posing a serious manufacturability problem for proposed quantum computers. Here we show that this problem does not arise in proposed architectures using Si/SiGe quantum dots because of the large in-plane strain in Si quantum wells together with the strong confinement potential typical of heterostructures.
We expand on previous work that treats relaxation physics of low-lying excited states in ideal, single electron, silicon quantum dots in the context of quantum computing. These states are of three types: orbital, valley, and spin. The relaxation times depend sensitively on system parameters such as the dot size and the external magnetic field. Generally, however, orbital relaxation times are short in strained silicon (from a tenth of a microsecond to picoseconds), spin relaxation times are long (microseconds to greater than seconds), while valley relaxation times are expected to lie in between…
A scalable quantum information processing architecture based on silicon metal-oxide-semiconductor technology is presented, combining quantum hardware elements from planar and 3D silicon-on-insulator technologies. This architecture is expressed in the ``unit cell'' approach, where tiling cells in two dimensions and allowing inter-cellular nearest-neighbour interactions makes the architecture compatible with the surface code for fault tolerant quantum computation. The architecture utilises global control methods, substantially reducing processor complexity with scale: Single-qubit control is ach…
We show that it is possible to employ reservoir engineering to turn two distant and relatively bad cavities into one good cavity with a tunable spontaneous decay rate. As a result, quantum computing schemes, that would otherwise require the shuttling of atomic qubits in and out of an optical resonator, can now be applied to distant quantum dots. To illustrate this we transform a recent proposal to entangle two qubits via the observation of macroscopic fluorescence signals [Metz et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 040503 (2006)] to the electron-spin states of two semiconductor quantum dots. Our scheme…
Electrons confined in silicon quantum dots exhibit orbital, spin, and valley degrees of freedom. The valley degree of freedom originates from the bulk bandstructure of silicon, which has six degenerate electronic minima. The degeneracy can be lifted in silicon quantum wells due to strain and electronic confinement, but the "valley splitting" of the two lowest lying valleys is known to be sensitive to atomic-scale disorder. Large valley splittings are desirable to have a well-defined spin qubit. In addition, an understanding of the inter-valley tunnel coupling that couples different valleys in …
The energies of valley-orbit states in silicon quantum dots are determined by an as yet poorly understood interplay between interface roughness, orbital confinement, and electron interactions. Here, we report measurements of one- and two-electron valley-orbit state energies as the dot potential is modified by changing gate voltages, and we calculate these same energies using full configuration interaction calculations. The results enable an understanding of the interplay between the physical contributions and enable a new probe of the quantum well interface.
A quantum shuttle is an archetypical nanoelectromechanical device, where the mechanical degree of freedom is quantized. Using a full-scale numerical solution of the generalized master equation describing the shuttle, we have recently shown [Novotný {\it et al.}, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 92}, 248302 (2004)] that for certain limits of the shuttle parameters one can distinguish three distinct charge transport mechanisms: (i) an incoherent tunneling regime, (ii) a shuttling regime, where the charge transport is synchronous with the mechanical motion, and (iii) a coexistence regime, where the device s…
Quantum computers have the potential to efficiently solve problems in logistics, drug and material design, finance, and cybersecurity. However, millions of qubits will be necessary for correcting inevitable errors in quantum operations. In this scenario, electron spins in gate-defined silicon quantum dots are strong contenders for encoding qubits, leveraging the microelectronics industry know-how for fabricating densely populated chips with nanoscale electrodes. The sophisticated material combinations used in commercially manufactured transistors, however, will have a very different impact on …
We demonstrate the measurement of p-channel silicon-on-insulator quantum dots at liquid helium temperatures by using a radio frequency (rf) reflectometry circuit comprising of two independently tunable GaAs varactors. This arrangement allows observing Coulomb diamonds at 4.2\,K under nearly best matching condition and optimal signal-to-noise ratio. We also discuss the rf leakage induced by the presence of the large top gate in MOS nanostructures and its consequence on the efficiency of rf-reflectometry. These results open the way to fast and sensitive readout in multi-gate architectures, inclu…
RF reflectometry offers a fast and sensitive method for charge sensing and spin readout in gated quantum dots. We focus in this work on the implementation of RF readout in accumulation-mode gate-defined quantum dots, where the large parasitic capacitance poses a challenge. We describe and test two methods for mitigating the effect of the parasitic capacitance, one by on-chip modifications and a second by off-chip changes. We demonstrate that these methods enable high-performance charge readout in Si/SiGe quantum dots, achieving a fidelity of 99.9% for a measurement time of 1 $μ$s.
We demonstrate a coherent spin shuttle through a GaAs/AlGaAs quadruple-quantum-dot array. Starting with two electrons in a spin-singlet state in the first dot, we shuttle one electron over to either the second, third or fourth dot. We observe that the separated spin-singlet evolves periodically into the $m=0$ spin-triplet and back before it dephases due to nuclear spin noise. We attribute the time evolution to differences in the local Zeeman splitting between the respective dots. With the help of numerical simulations, we analyse and discuss the visibility of the singlet-triplet oscillations a…
We investigate spin relaxation in a silicon double quantum dot via leakage current through Pauli blockade as a function of interdot detuning and magnetic field. A dip in leakage current as a function of magnetic field on a \sim 40 mT field scale is attributed to spin-orbit mediated spin relaxation. On a larger (\sim 400 mT) field scale, a peak in leakage current is seen in some, but not all, Pauli-blocked transitions, and is attributed to spin-flip cotunneling. Both dip and peak structure show good agreement between theory and experiment.
We demonstrate a hybrid device architecture where the charge states in a double quantum dot (DQD) formed in a Si/SiGe heterostructure are read out using an on-chip superconducting microwave cavity. A quality factor Q = 5,400 is achieved by selectively etching away regions of the quantum well and by reducing photon losses through low-pass filtering of the gate bias lines. Homodyne measurements of the cavity transmission reveal DQD charge stability diagrams and a charge-cavity coupling rate g_c/2pi = 23 MHz. These measurements indicate that electrons trapped in a Si DQD can be effectively couple…
