No Arabic abstract
We investigated the time dependence of two-electron spin states in a double quantum dot fabricated in an InAs nanowire. In this system, spin-orbit interaction has substantial influence on the spin states of confined electrons. Pumping single electrons through a Pauli spin-blockade configuration allowed to probe the dynamics of the two coupled spins via their influence on the pumped current. We observed spin-relaxation with a magnetic field dependence different from GaAs dots, which can be explained by spin-orbit interaction. Oscillations were detected for times shorter than the relaxation time, which we attribute to coherent evolution of the spin states.
The spatial separation of electron spins followed by the control of their individual spin dynamics has recently emerged as an essential ingredient in many proposals for spin-based technologies because it would enable both of the two spin species to be simultaneously utilized, distinct from most of the current spintronic studies and technologies wherein only one spin species could be handled at a time. Here we demonstrate that the spatial spin splitting of a coherent beam of electrons can be achieved and controlled using the interplay between an external magnetic field and Rashba spin-orbit interaction in semiconductor nanostructures. The technique of transverse magnetic focusing is used to detect this spin separation. More notably, our ability to engineer the spin-orbit interactions enables us to simultaneously manipulate and probe the coherent spin dynamics of both spin species and hence their correlation, which could open a route towards spintronics and spin-based quantum information processing.
A spin qubit in semiconductor quantum dots holds promise for quantum information processing for scalability and long coherence time. An important semiconductor qubit system is a double quantum dot trapping two electrons or holes, whose spin states encode either a singlet-triplet qubit or two single-spin qubits coupled by exchange interaction. In this article, we report progress on spin dephasing of two exchange-coupled spins in a double quantum dot. We first discuss the schemes of two-qubit gates and qubit encodings in gate-defined quantum dots or donor atoms based on the exchange interaction. Then, we report the progress on spin dephasing of a singlet-triplet qubit or a two-qubit gate. The methods of suppressing spin dephasing are further discussed. The understanding of spin dephasing may provide insights into the realization of high-fidelity quantum gates for spin-based quantum computing.
We map electron spin dynamics from time to space in quantum wires with spatially uniform and oscillating Rashba spin-orbit coupling. The presence of the spin-orbit interaction introduces pseudo-Zeeman couplings of the electron spins to effective magnetic fields. We show that by periodically modulating the spin-orbit coupling along the quantum wire axis, it is possible to create the spatial analogue of spin resonance, without the need for any real magnetic fields. The mapping of time-dependent operations onto a spatial axis suggests a new mode for quantum information processing in which gate operations are encoded into the band structure of the material. We describe a realization of such materials within nanowires at the interface of LaAlO3/SrTiO3 heterostructures.
The presence of valley states is a significant obstacle to realizing quantum information technologies in Silicon quantum dots, as leakage into alternate valley states can introduce errors into the computation. We use a perturbative analytical approach to study the dynamics of exchange-coupled quantum dots with valley degrees of freedom. We show that if the valley splitting is large and electrons are not properly initialized to valley eigenstates, then time evolution of the system will lead to spin-valley entanglement. Spin-valley entanglement will also occur if the valley splitting is small and electrons are not initialized to the same valley state. Additionally, we show that for small valley splitting, spin-valley entanglement does not affect measurement probabilities of two-qubit systems; however, systems with more qubits will be affected. This means that two-qubit gate fidelities measured in two-qubit systems may miss the effects of valley degrees of freedom. Our work shows how the existence of valleys may adversely affect multiqubit fidelities even when the system temperature is very low.
We argue that Coulomb blockade phenomena are a useful probe of the cross-over to strong correlation in quantum dots. Through calculations at low density using variational and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (up to r_s ~ 55), we find that the addition energy shows a clear progression from features associated with shell structure to those caused by commensurability of a Wigner crystal. This cross-over (which occurs near r_s ~ 20 for spin-polarized electrons) is, then, a signature of interaction-driven localization. As the addition energy is directly measurable in Coulomb blockade conductance experiments, this provides a direct probe of localization in the low density electron gas.