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arXiv:2303.14410

Two Anderson impurities coupled through a superconducting island: charge stability diagrams and double impurity qubit

Filip K. Malinowski

Published Mar 25, 2023• 1 citation
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Abstract

We present a model of two Anderson impurities coupled to and through a superconducting island. The model parametrizes the strength of the coupling between impurity sites, allowing it to represent a variable distance between the impurities. We systematically explore the effect of the model parameters in the subspaces with total even and odd occupancy, identifying unique features of the charge stability diagrams that distinguish the two parities. For total odd electron parity, we identify a device tuning, in which the splitting between the two lowest energy states is highly insensitive to changes of the chemical potentials. We investigate the degree to which a qubit based on such two states is tunable and discuss an optimal choice of parameters to maximize inhomogeneous dephasing time. Finally, we point out that the proposed qubit lacks a transition dipole moment, and outline some of the consequences on viable driving and readout mechanisms. The prototype qubits could be realized with the existing capabilities of coupling quantum dots to hard-gapped superconductors.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2303.14410

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We present a model of two Anderson impurities coupled to and through a superconducting island. The model parametrizes the strength of the coupling between impurity sites, allowing it to represent a variable distance between the impurities. We systematically explore the effect of the model parameters in the subspaces with total even and odd occupancy, identifying unique features of the charge stability diagrams that distinguish the two parities. For total odd electron parity, we identify a device tuning, in which the splitting between the two lowest energy states is highly insensitive to changes of the chemical potentials. We investigate the degree to which a qubit based on such two states is tunable and discuss an optimal choice of parameters to maximize inhomogeneous dephasing time. Finally, we point out that the proposed qubit lacks a transition dipole moment, and outline some of the consequences on viable driving and readout mechanisms. The prototype qubits could be realized with the existing capabilities of coupling quantum dots to hard-gapped superconductors.
Bound states in quantum dots coupled to superconductors can be in a coherent superposition of states with different electron number but with the same fermion parity. Electrostatic gating can tune this superposition to a sweet spot, where the quantum dot has the same mean electric charge independent of its electron-number parity. Here, we propose to encode quantum information in the local fermion parity of two tunnel-coupled quantum dots embedded in a Josephson junction. At the sweet spot, the qubit states have zero charge dipole moment. This protects the qubit from dephasing due to charge noise acting on the potential of each dot, as well as fluctuations of the (weak) interdot tunneling. At weak interdot tunneling, relaxation is suppressed because of disjoint qubit states. However, for strong interdot tunneling the system is protected against noise affecting each quantum dot separately (energy-level noise, dot-superconductor tunneling fluctuations, and hyperfine interactions). Finally, we describe initialization and readout as well as single-qubit and two-qubit gates by pulsing gate voltages. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
The number of electrons in small metallic or semiconducting islands is quantised. When tunnelling is enabled via opaque barriers this number can change by an integer. In superconductors the addition is in units of two electron charges (2e), reflecting that the Cooper pair condensate must have an even parity. This ground state (GS) is foundational for all superconducting qubit devices. Here, we study a hybrid superconducting-semiconducting island and find three typical GS evolutions in a parallel magnetic field: a robust 2e-periodic even-parity GS, a transition to a 2e-periodic odd-parity GS, and a transition from a 2e- to a 1e-periodic GS. The 2e-periodic odd-parity GS persistent in gate-voltage occurs when a spin-resolved subgap state crosses zero energy. For our 1e-periodic GSs we explicitly show the origin being a single zero-energy state gapped from the continuum, i.e., compatible with an Andreev bound states stabilized at zero energy or the presence of Majorana zero modes.
We demonstrate the Josephson effect in a serial double quantum dot defined in a nanowire with epitaxial superconducting leads. The supercurrent stability diagram adopts a honeycomb pattern. We observe sharp discontinuities in the magnitude of the critical current, I_{c}, as a function of dot occupation, related to doublet to singlet ground state transitions. Detuning of the energy levels offers a tuning knob for I_{c}, which attains a maximum at zero detuning. The consistency between experiment and theory indicates that our device is a faithful realization of the two-impurity Anderson model.
The physical properties of a material tuned to the cusp between two distinct ground states can be quite exotic, and unlike those in either of the neighboring phases. The prospect of capturing such behavior in a simple model is tantalizing; for example, the interplay between heavy fermion physics and magnetic ordering in certain materials is often rationalized in terms of the quantum phase transition in the two-impurity Kondo model. However, this model is oversimplified for the purpose: its quantum critical point does not reflect the distinctive properties of a magnetic lattice surrounded by mobile electrons. In this work, we study a tunable nanoelectronic circuit comprising two coupled charge-Kondo quantum islands, realizing a new model which captures the essence of competition between local and collective screening of magnetic moments. This may have relevance for materials in which collective many-body effects drive lattice coherence. We tune our device to a novel quantum critical point, and show experimentally that deviations as we tune away from this point match non-trivial predictions from the model. This work on the crucial role of inter-island interactions is a necessary first step in scaling up such circuits from individual sites to networks or lattices.
We present a theoretical study of a system consisting of a superconducting island and two quantum dots, a possible platform for building qubits and Cooper pair splitters, in the regime where each dot hosts a single electron and, hence, carries a magnetic moment. We focus on the case where the dots are coupled to overlapping superconductor states and we study whether the spins are ferromagnetically or antiferromagnetically aligned. We show that if the total number of particles is even the spins align antiferromagnetically in the flatband limit, i.e., when the bandwidth of the superconductor is negligibly small, but they align ferromagnetically if the bandwidth is finite and above some value. If the total number of particles is odd, the alignment is ferromagnetic independently from the bandwidth. This implies that the results of the flatband limit are applicable only within a restricted parameter regime for realistic superconducting qubit systems and that some care is required in applying simplified models to devices such as Cooper pair splitters.