No Arabic abstract
The main obstacle to coherent control of two-level quantum systems is their coupling to an uncontrolled environment. For electron spins in III-V quantum dots, the random environment is mostly given by the nuclear spins in the quantum dot host material; they collectively act on the electron spin through the hyperfine interaction, much like a random magnetic field. Here we show that the same hyperfine interaction can be harnessed such that partial control of the normally uncontrolled environment becomes possible. In particular, we observe that the electron spin resonance frequency remains locked to the frequency of an applied microwave magnetic field, even when the external magnetic field or the excitation frequency are changed. The nuclear field thereby adjusts itself such that the electron spin resonance condition remains satisfied. General theoretical arguments indicate that this spin resonance locking is accompanied by a significant reduction of the randomness in the nuclear field.
We show that scattering of the conduction electrons by nuclear spins via the hyperfine interaction may lead the upper limit on the mean free path in clean metals. Nuclear spins with s >1/2 may cause a strong dephasing in dirty limit due to the quadrupole coupling to the random potential fluctuations caused by static impurities and lattice imperfections.
We polarize nuclear spins in a GaAs double quantum dot by controlling two-electron spin states near the anti-crossing of the singlet (S) and m_S=+1 triplet (T+) using pulsed gates. An initialized S state is cyclically brought into resonance with the T+ state, where hyperfine fields drive rapid rotations between S and T+, flipping an electron spin and flopping a nuclear spin. The resulting Overhauser field approaches 80 mT, in agreement with a simple rate-equation model. A self-limiting pulse sequence is developed that allows the steady-state nuclear polarization to be set using a gate voltage.
We show here the existence of the indirect coupling of electron and magnetic or nuclear ion spins in self-assembled quantum dots mediated by electron-electron interactions. With a single localized spin placed in the center of the dot, only the spins of electrons occupying the zero angular momentum states couple directly to the localized spin. We show that when the electron-electron interactions are included, the electrons occupying finite angular momentum orbitals interact with the localized spin. This effective interaction is obtained using exact diagonalization of the microscopic Hamiltonian as a function of the number of electronic shells, shell spacing, and anisotropy of the electron-Mn exchange interaction. The effective interaction can be engineered to be either ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic by tuning the parameters of the quantum dot.
We experimentally demonstrate the use of a single electronic spin to measure the quantum dynamics of distant individual nuclear spins from within a surrounding spin bath. Our technique exploits coherent control of the electron spin, allowing us to isolate and monitor nuclear spins weakly coupled to the electron spin. Specifically, we detect the evolution of distant individual carbon-13 nuclear spins coupled to single nitrogen vacancy centers in a diamond lattice with hyperfine couplings down to a factor of 8 below the electronic spin bare dephasing rate. Potential applications to nanoscale magnetic resonance imaging and quantum information processing are discussed.
We study decoherence of nuclear spins in a GaAs quantum well structure using resistively detected nuclear magnetic resonance. The transverse decoherence time T2 of 75As nuclei is estimated from Rabi-type coherent oscillations as well as by using spin-echo techniques. By analyzing T2 obtained by decoupling techniques, we extract the role of dipole-dipole interactions as sources of decoherence in GaAs. Under the condition that the device is tilted in an external magnetic field, we exhibit enhanced decoherence induced by the change in strength of the direct dipole-dipole interactions between first nearest-neighbor nuclei. The results agree well with simple numerical calculations.