Using real-time charge sensing and gate pulsing techniques we measure the ratio of the rates for tunneling into the excited and ground spin states of a single-electron AlGaAs/GaAs quantum dot in a parallel magnetic field. We find that the ratio decreases with increasing magnetic field until tunneling into the excited spin state is completely suppressed. However, we find that by adjusting the voltages on the surface gates to change the orbital configuration of the dot we can restore tunneling into the excited spin state and that the ratio reaches a maximum when the dot is symmetric.
We present measurements of the rates for an electron to tunnel on and off a quantum dot, obtained using a quantum point contact charge sensor. The tunnel rates show exponential dependence on drain-source bias and plunger gate voltages. The tunneling process is shown to be elastic, and a model describing tunneling in terms of the dot energy relative to the height of the tunnel barrier quantitatively describes the measurements.
Using background-free detection of spin-state-dependent resonance fluorescence from a single-electron charged quantum dot with an efficiency of 0:1%, we realize a single spin-photon interface where the detection of a scattered photon with 300 picosecond time resolution projects the quantum dot spin to a definite spin eigenstate with fidelity exceeding 99%. The bunching of resonantly scattered photons reveals information about electron spin dynamics. High-fidelity fast spin-state initialization heralded by a single photon enables the realization of quantum information processing tasks such as non-deterministic distant spin entanglement. Given that we could suppress the measurement back-action to well below the natural spin-flip rate, realization of a quantum non-demolition measurement of a single spin could be achieved by increasing the fluorescence collection efficiency by a factor exceeding 20 using a photonic nanostructure.
Single-molecule magnets facilitate the study of quantum tunneling of magnetization at the mesoscopic level. The spin-parity effect is among the fundamental predictions that have yet to be clearly observed. It is predicted that quantum tunneling is suppressed at zero transverse field if the total spin of the magnetic system is half-integer (Kramers degeneracy) but is allowed in integer spin systems. The Landau-Zener method is used to measure the tunnel splitting as a function of transverse field. Spin-parity dependent tunneling is established by comparing the transverse field dependence of the tunnel splitting of integer and half-integer spin systems.
We present a method for reading out the spin state of electrons in a quantum dot that is robust against charge noise and can be used even when the electron temperature exceeds the energy splitting between the states. The spin states are first correlated to different charge states using a spin dependence of the tunnel rates. A subsequent fast measurement of the charge on the dot then reveals the original spin state. We experimentally demonstrate the method by performing read-out of the two-electron spin states, achieving a single-shot visibility of more than 80%. We find very long triplet-to-singlet relaxation times (up to several milliseconds), with a strong dependence on in-plane magnetic field.
We compare the conductance of an undoped graphene sheet with a small region subject to an electrostatic gate potential for the cases that the dynamics in the gated region is regular (disc-shaped region) and classically chaotic (stadium). For the disc, we find sharp resonances that narrow upon reducing the area fraction of the gated region. We relate this observation to the existence of confined electronic states. For the stadium, the conductance looses its dependence on the gate voltage upon reducing the area fraction of the gated region, which signals the lack of confinement of Dirac quasiparticles in a gated region with chaotic classical electron dynamics.