Nuclear spins show exceptionally long coherence times but the underlying good isolation from their environment is a challenge when it comes to controlling nuclear spin qubits. A particular difficulty, not only for nuclear spin qubits, is the realization of two-qubit gates between distant qubits. Recently, strong coupling between an electron spin and microwave resonator photons as well as a microwave resonator mediated coupling between two electron spins both in the resonant and the dispersive regime have been reported and, thus, a microwave resonator mediated electron spin two-qubit gate seems to be in reach. Inspired by these findings, we theoretically investigate the interaction of a microwave resonator with a hybrid quantum dot-donor (QDD) system consisting of a gate-defined Si QD and a laterally displaced 31P phosphorous donor atom implanted in the Si host material. We find that driving the QDD system allows to compensate the frequency mismatch between the donor nuclear spin splitting in the MHz regime and typical superconducting resonator frequencies in the GHz regime, and also enables an effective nuclear spin-photon coupling. While we expect this coupling to be weak, we predict that coupling the nuclear spins of two distant QDD systems dispersively to the microwave resonator allows the implementation of a resonator-mediated nuclear spin two-qubit iSWAP gate with a gate fidelity approaching 90.
Abstract Nonlocal qubit interactions are a hallmark of advanced quantum information technologies1–5. The ability to transfer quantum states and generate entanglement over distances much larger than qubit length scales greatly increases connectivity and is an important step towards maximal parallelism and the implementation of two-qubit gates on arbitrary pairs of qubits6. Qubit-coupling schemes based on cavity quantum electrodynamics2, 7, 8 also offer the possibility of using high-quality-factor resonators as quantum memories3, 9. Extending qubit interactions beyond the nearest neighbour is particularly beneficial for spin-based quantum computing architectures, which are limited by short-range exchange interactions10. Despite the rapidly maturing device technology for silicon spin qubits11–16, experimental progress towards achieving long-range spin–spin coupling has so far been restricted to interactions between individual spins and microwave photons17–20. Here we demonstrate resonant microwave-mediated coupling between two electron spins that are physically separated by more than four millimetres. An enhanced vacuum Rabi splitting is observed when both spins are tuned into resonance with the cavity, indicating a coherent interaction between the two spins and a cavity photon. Our results imply that microwave-frequency photons may be used to generate long-range two-qubit gates between spatially separated spins.