We study the dark excitons behavior as a coherent physical two-level spin system (qubit) using an external magnetic field in the Faraday configuration. Our studies are based on polarization-sensitive intensity autocorrelation measurements of the optical transition resulting from the recombination of a spin-blockaded biexciton state, which heralds the dark exciton and its spin state. We demonstrate control over the dark exciton eigenstates without degrading its decoherence time. Our observations agree well with computational predictions based on a master equation model.
We investigate the system constituted by a polarizable atom near a nanosphere under the influence of an external electrostatic field, showing that the attractive dispersive force between them can be overcome by the electrostatic interaction. Therefore, in addition to the advantageous possibility of actively tuning the resultant force with an external agent without the requirement of physical contact, this force may also become repulsive. We analyze this situation in different physical regimes of distance and explore the interaction of different atoms with both metallic and dielectric spheres, discussing which cases are easier to control. Furthermore, our results reveal that these repulsive forces can be achieved with feasible field intensities in the laboratory.
The dark exciton state in semiconductor quantum dots constitutes a long-lived solid-state qubit which has the potential to play an important role in implementations of solid-state based quantum information architectures. In this work, we exploit deterministically fabricated QD microlenses with enhanced photon extraction, to optically prepare and readout the dark exciton spin and observe its coherent precession. The optical access to the dark exciton is provided via spin-blockaded metastable biexciton states acting as heralding state, which are identified deploying polarization-sensitive spectroscopy as well as time-resolved photon cross-correlation experiments. Our experiments reveal a spin-precession period of the dark exciton of $(0.82pm0.01),$ns corresponding to a fine-structure splitting of $(5.0pm0.7),mu$eV between its eigenstates $left|uparrowUparrowpmdownarrowDownarrowrightrangle$. By exploiting microlenses deterministically fabricated above pre-selected QDs, our work demonstrates the possibility to scale up implementations of quantum information processing schemes using the QD-confined dark exciton spin qubit, such as the generation of photonic cluster states or the realization of a solid-state-based quantum memory.
We report a study of the magnetic field dependence of the photo-luminescence of NV$^-$ centers (negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy centers) in diamond single crystals. In such a magnetic field dependence characteristic lines are observed, which are coming from Level Anti-Crossings (LACs) in the coupled electron-nuclear spin system. For enhancing the sensitivity, we used lock-in detection to measure the photo-luminescence intensity and observed a remarkably strong dependence of the LAC-derived lines on the modulation frequency. Upon decreasing of the modulation frequency from 12 kHz to 17 Hz the amplitude of the lines increases by approximately two orders of magnitude. To take a quantitative account for such effects, we developed a theoretical model, which describes the spin dynamics in the coupled electron-nuclear spin system under the action of an oscillating external magnetic field. Good agreement between experiments and theory allows us to conclude that the observed effects are originating from coherent spin polarization exchange in the NV$^-$ center. Our results are of great practical importance allowing one to optimize the experimental conditions for probing LAC-derived lines in diamond defect centers.
We demonstrate that the quantum dot-confined dark exciton forms a long-lived integer spin solid state qubit which can be deterministically on-demand initiated in a pure state by one optical pulse. Moreover, we show that this qubit can be fully controlled using short optical pulses, which are several orders of magnitude shorter than the life and coherence times of the qubit. Our demonstrations do not require an externally applied magnetic field and they establish that the quantum dot-confined dark exciton forms an excellent solid state matter qubit with some advantages over the half-integer spin qubits such as the confined electron and hole, separately. Since quantum dots are semiconductor nanostructures that allow integration of electronic and photonic components, the dark exciton may have important implications on implementations of quantum technologies consisting of semiconductor qubits.
The skyrmions generated by frustration in centrosymmetric structures host extra internal degrees of freedom: vorticity and helicity, resulting in distinctive properties and potential functionality, which are not shared by the skyrmions stemming from the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in noncentrosymmetric structures. The present work indicates that the magnetism-driven electric polarization carried by skyrmions provides a direct handle for tuning helicity. Especially for the in-plane magnetized skyrmions, the helicity can be continuously rotated and exactly picked by applying an external electric field for both skyrmions and antiskyrmions. The in-plane uniaxial anisotropy is beneficial to this manipulation.