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arXiv:2104.07581 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Interplay of charge noise and coupling to phonons in adiabatic electron transfer between quantum dots

Jan A. Krzywda, Łukasz Cywiński

Published Aug 20, 2021• 28 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Long-distance transfer of quantum information in architectures based on quantum dot spin qubits will be necessary for their scalability. One way of achieving this goal is to simply move the electron between two quantum registers. Precise control over the process of shuttling such a single electron through a chain of tunnel-coupled quantum dots is possible when interdot energy detunings are changed adiabatically. The deterministic character of shuttling is, however, endangered by the open nature of the system, as the transferred electron is coupled to thermal reservoirs: sources of fluctuations of electric fields and lattice vibrations. We present a comprehensive analysis showing how the electron transfer between two voltage-controlled quantum dots is affected by electron-phonon scattering and interaction with sources of $1/f$ and Johnson charge noise in both detuning and tunnel coupling. The electron-phonon scattering turns out to be irrelevant in Si quantum dots, with charge noise dominating the dynamics of the system at slow detuning sweep, when the electron spends more time delocalized between the dots (i.e., near the anticrossing of the tunnel-coupled states). Competition between the effects of charge noise and the Landau-Zener effect leads to an existence of an optimal detuning sweep rate, leading to minimal probability of leaving the electron behind. In GaAs quantum dots, on the other hand, piezoelectric coupling to phonons is strong enough to make the processes of interdot transfer assisted by phonon emission and absorption dominate over transitions caused by charge noise. The probability of leaving the electron behind then depends monotonically on detuning the sweep rate over a broad range of rates, and values much smaller than in silicon can be obtained for slow sweeps. However, after taking into account limitations on transfer time imposed by the need for preservation of a shuttled electron's spin coherence, the minimal probabilities of leaving the electron behind in both GaAs- and Si-based double quantum dots turn out to be of the same order of magnitude. Bringing them down below ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}3}$ requires temperatures $\ensuremath{\le}100$ mK and tunnel couplings above $20\phantom{\rule{4pt}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{eV}$.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.104.075439

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Controlled adiabatic transfer of a single electron through a chain of quantum dots has been recently achieved in GaAs and Si/SiGe based quantum dots, opening prospects for turning stationary spin qubits into mobile ones and solving in this way the problem of long-distance communication between quantum registers in a scalable quantum computing architecture based on quantum dots. We consider theoretically the process of such an electron transfer between two tunnel-coupled quantum dots, focusing on control by slowly varying the detuning of energy levels in the dots. We take into account the fluctuations in detuning caused by 1/f1/f1/f-type noise that is ubiquitous in semiconductor nanostructures and analyze their influence on probability of successful transfer of an electron in a spin eigenstate. With numerical and analytical calculations we show that probability of electron not being transferred due to $1/{f}^{\ensuremath{\beta}}$ noise in detuning is $\ensuremath{\propto}\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}{\ensuremath{\sigma}}^{2}{t}^{\ensuremath{\beta}\ensuremath{-}1}/v$, where $\ensuremath{\sigma}$ characterizes the noise amplitude, ttt is the interdot tunnel coupling, and vvv is the detuning sweep rate. Interestingly, this means that the noise-induced errors in charge transfer are independent of ttt for 1/f1/f1/f noise. For realistic parameters taken from experiments on silicon-based quantum dots, we obtain the minimal probability of charge transfer failure between a pair of dots is limited by 1/f1/f1/f noise in detuning to be the on the order of 0.01. This means that in order to reliably transfer charges across many quantum dots, charge noise in the devices should be further suppressed, or tunnel couplings should be increased, in order to allow for faster transfer (and less exposure to noise), while not triggering the deterministic Landau-Zener excitation.
We consider charge qubits based on shallow donor electron states in silicon and coupled quantum dots in GaAs. Specifically, we study the feasibility of P2+{P}_{2}^{+}P2+​ charge qubits in Si, focusing on single qubit properties in terms of tunnel coupling between the two phosphorus donors and qubit decoherence caused by electron-phonon interaction. By taking into consideration the multivalley structure of the Si conduction band, we show that intervalley quantum interference has important consequences for single-qubit operations of P2+{P}_{2}^{+}P2+​ charge qubits. In particular, the valley interference leads to a tunnel-coupling strength distribution centered around zero. On the other hand, we find that the Si band structure does not dramatically affect the electron-phonon coupling and consequently, qubit coherence. We also critically compare charge qubit properties for Si:P2+\mathrm{Si}:{P}_{2}^{+}Si:P2+​ and GaAs double quantum dot quantum computer architectures.
Hole-phonon interactions play an important role in transport and decoherence processes in semiconductor quantum dots. Here we investigate hole-phonon coupling in a gate-defined GaAs double quantum dot integrated with a quantum point contact charge sensor. Under finite source-drain bias, pronounced oscillatory stripe patterns appear near specific charge transition regions in the charge stability diagram. We attribute these oscillations to phonon emission during inelastic interdot tunneling. A theoretical model including piezoelectric hole-phonon coupling reproduces the observed patterns. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the oscillations emerge only in particular charge configurations. Our results provide direct insight into phonon-assisted transport and coherent hole-phonon interactions in semiconductor quantum dots.
We investigate electron charge decoherence in a laterally coupled single-electron semiconductor double quantum dot through electron-phonon interaction. We analytically and numerically evaluate the relaxation and dephasing rates due to electron coupling to both acoustic and optical phonons, and explore the system parameter space in terms of interdot distance, strength of single-dot confinement, and interdot coupling strength. Our numerical results show that the electron scattering rates are strongly dependent on the strength of the electron confinement and the size of the system. In addition, although the most dominant factor that determines the charge decoherence rate is the energy splitting between the charge qubit states, the details of the double dot configuration are also very important.
Landau-Zener-Stuckelberg-Majorana (LZSM) physics has been exploited to coherently manipulate two-electron spin states in a GaAs double quantum dot (DQD) at a singlet (S)-triplet (T+) anti-crossing. The anti-crossing results from the hyperfine interaction with the nuclear spins of the host material [1,2]. However, the fluctuations of the nuclear spin bath result in spin dephasing within T ∗ 2 ∼ 10− 20 ns. As a consequence, the sweep through the anti-crossing would have to be performed on a timescale comparable to T ∗ 2 to achieve LZSM oscillations with 100% visibility. Moreover, the S-T+ anti-crossing is located near the (1, 1)− (2, 0) interdot charge transition, where (nl, nr) denotes the number of electrons in the left and right quantum dot. As a result the singlet state involved in the dynamics is a superpostion of (1, 1) and (2, 0) singlet states. Here we show that it is possible to increase the oscillation visibility while keeping sweep times less than T ∗ 2 using a tailored pulse with a detuning dependent level velocity. The pulse includes a slow level velocity portion that is chosen to coincide with the passage through the S-T+ anti-crossing and two fast level velocity portions. The latter minimize the time spent in regions where spin and charge degrees of freedom are entangled, which renders the qubit susceptible to charge noise. The slow level velocity portion of the pulse results in a stronger effective coupling between the spins states, which increases the oscillations visibility [3,4]. In particular, we were able to obtain a visibility of ∼ 0.5 for LZSM oscillations. This constitutes an important step towards the implementation of a Hadamard gate.