Spin qubits in quantum dots are a promising technology for quantum computing due to their fast response time and long coherence times. An electromagnetic pulse is applied to the system for a specific duration to perform a desired rotation. To avoid decoherence, the amplitude and gate time must be highly accurate. In this work, we aim to study the impact of leakage during the gate time evolution of a spin qubit encoded in a double quantum dot device. We prove that, in the weak interaction regime, leakage introduces a shift in the phase of the time evolution operator, causing over- or under-rotations. Indeed, controlling the leakage terms is useful for adjusting the time needed to perform a quantum computation and increasing the coherence time of the readout process. This is crucial for running fault-tolerant algorithms and is beneficial for Quantum Error Mitigation techniques.
Impact of leakage on the dynamics of a ST0 qubit implemented in a Double Quantum Dot device
Spin qubits in quantum dots are a promising technology for quantum computing due to their fast response time and long coherence times. An electromagnetic pulse is applied to the system for a specific duration to perform a desired rotation. To avoid decoherence, the amplitude and gate time must be highly accurate. In this work, we aim to study the impact of leakage during the gate time evolution of a spin qubit encoded in a double quantum dot device. We prove that, in the weak interaction regime, leakage introduces a shift in the phase of the time evolution operator, causing over- or under-rotations. Indeed, controlling the leakage terms is useful for adjusting the time needed to perform a quantum computation and increasing the coherence time of the readout process. This is crucial for running fault-tolerant algorithms and is beneficial for Quantum Error Mitigation techniques.
The double-quantum-dot device benefits from the advantages of both the spin and charge qubits, while offering ways to mitigate their drawbacks. Careful gate voltage modulation can grant greater spinlike or chargelike dynamics to the device, yielding long coherence times with the former and high electrical susceptibility with the latter for electrically driven spin rotations or coherent interactions with microwave photons. As this architecture is a serious contender for the realization of a versatile physical qubit, improving its control is a critical step toward building a large-scale spin-based universal quantum computer. We show that optimal control pulses generated using the gradient ascent pulse engineering algorithm can yield higher fidelity operating regime transfers than can be achieved using linear methods.
In recent advancements of quantum computing utilizing spin qubits, it has been demonstrated that this platform possesses the potential for implementing two-qubit gates with fidelities exceeding 99.5%. However, as with other qubit platforms, it is not feasible to completely turn qubit couplings off. This study aims to investigate the impact of coherent error matrices in gate set tomography by employing a double quantum dot. We evaluate the infidelity caused by residual exchange between spins and compare various mitigation approaches, including the use of adjusted timing through simple drives, considering different parameter settings in the presence of charge noise. Furthermore, we extend our analysis to larger arrays of exchange-coupled spin qubits to provide an estimation of the expected fidelity. In particular, we demonstrate the influence of residual exchange on a single-qubit Y gate and the native two-qubit SWAP gate in a linear chain. Our findings emphasize the significance of accounting for residual exchange when scaling up spin-qubit devices and highlight the tradeoff between the effects of charge noise and residual exchange in mitigation techniques. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
The growing interest in quantum computers has triggered various approaches for the realization of a large-scale quantum processor that can eventually outperform classical high-performance computers. Quantum computers are attracting increasing attention for their potential to enormously accelerate the simulation of quantum systems and the solution of optimization problems, promising an immense impact, particularly in fields such as chemistry, medicine, and cybersecurity. Although it is still a long way to a practical quantum device, the progress over the last decades has shown encouraging results for a so far limited number of quantum bits, or qubits for short, which represent the computational units of the processor. One promising platform for the implementation of qubits is the spin of charge carriers in semiconductor quantum dots. Especially the use of purified silicon as a host material has significantly improved the performance of quantum operations. Advanced fabrication techniques from the established semiconductor industry in principle allow for the manufacturing of a large number of qubits on a small chip, making them specifically competitive from the perspective of scalability. In this thesis, we investigate challenges for electron spin qubits, particularly in the context of scaling to large qubit arrays for quantum computation. We evaluate the performance of quantum gates, present error mitigation strategies, and propose new quantum operations for two particular spin qubit implementations. In a dense array of Loss-DiVincenzo spin qubits on a chip, quantum information can be electrically controlled by microwave pulses. For neighboring qubits, capacitive couplings of nearby electrodes lead to crosstalk that affects the quantum computation. The first examination in this thesis addresses the effect of crosstalk on idling and operating spin qubits due to an interfering microwave drive. After the analysis and characterization of the performance, we suggest mitigation protocols for different constellations of important quantum gates, which can be easily implemented experimentally. We further show how to reduce crosstalk in a two-qubit gate using an asymmetric driving scheme, resulting in an enormous improvement of the gate performance, and may be used to generally overcome the obstacle of crosstalk. An additional source of errors in spin qubit registers originates from the finite residual exchange interaction between neighboring qubits. It arises due to a finite overlap of the electron wave functions and is caused by the limited speed at which the applied voltages can be controlled. We evaluate the fidelity of doing quantum operations under these circumstances with a varying number of neighboring qubits and present robust mitigation schemes with a decent performance also in the presence of noise. Besides crosstalk, another crucial observation in experiments using microwaves is the heating caused by the delivery of high-power radio frequency pulses to the quantum chip and results in a change of the qubit properties. We therefore investigate the impact of phonons on the energy levels in spin qubits to identify a temperature-dependent correction to the qubit state splitting. As microwave pulses are associated with potential errors, exchange-only qubits represent a promising alternative to achieve universal quantum computation only using baseband control. Therefore, we shift our focus towards exchange-only qubits and outline the main error sources in these systems, including residual exchange interactions between spins, charge noise from the applied voltages, and magnetic fluctuations in the material. A consequential complication of this implementation is that the quantum information can leak out of the qubit states. This effect, however, can be reduced in the presence of a finite magnetic field, as we will demonstrate in this thesis. The gate construction for exchange-only qubits usually requires more pulse steps than in the previous qubit type. Nevertheless, if exchange interactions are switched on simultaneously, this can result in faster quantum gates, as we demonstrate in this thesis. Especially the discovery of a quantum operation that introduces relative phases between computational and leakage states can be of interest for the construction of two-qubit gates and will be discussed in an example for a special operation space.
Coherent spatial transport or shuttling of a single electron spin through semiconductor nanostructures is an important ingredient in many spintronic and quantum computing applications. In this work we analyze the possible errors in solid-state quantum computation due to leakage in transporting a single-spin qubit through a semiconductor double quantum dot. In particular, we consider three possible sources of leakage errors associated with such transport: finite ramping times, spin-dependent tunneling rates between quantum dots induced by finite spin-orbit couplings, and the presence of multiple valley states. In each case we present quantitative estimates of the leakage errors, and discuss how they can be minimized. The emphasis of this work is on how to deal with the errors intrinsic to the ideal semiconductor structure, such as leakage due to spin-orbit couplings, rather than on errors due to defects or noise sources. In particular, we show that in order to minimize leakage errors induced by spin-dependent tunnelings, it is necessary to apply pulses to perform certain carefully designed spin rotations. We further develop a formalism that allows one to systematically derive constraints on the pulse shapes and present a few examples to highlight the advantage of such an approach.
In this thesis we present a spin based QuBit Architecture that implements single-QuBit gates in the QuBit itself and is predicted to have a long coherence time.
This architecture has been physically realized in a Ferromagnetic Double Quantum Dot hosted in a Single Wall Carbon Nanotube, and studied through a coupled Microwave cavity. We present a Linear Response Theory model that ties the transmitted amplitude and phase of the microwave signal through the cavity to the microscopic charge susceptibility of the Double Quantum Dot. We fit those two channels of experimental data to a simple 4 level master equation model that allows us to extract the inter-dot tunneling rate, the charge-photons coupling rate and the charge dephasing rate. We also present a numerical algorithm that allows to evolve in time the quantum state of the device also considering the effect of charge noise. This algorithm is used to study the effect of fast Landau-Zener style pulses on the QuBit, giving the ideal shape of the control pulses.
A comparison of gate fidelities between different spin qubit types defined in quantum dots and a donor under different control errors is reported. We studied five qubit types, namely the quantum dot spin qubit, the double quantum dot singlet-triplet qubit, the double quantum dot hybrid qubit, the donor qubit and the quantum dot spin-donor qubit. For each one, we derived analytical time sequences that realize single qubit rotations along the principal axis of the Bloch sphere. We estimated the effects of control errors on the gate fidelity by using a Gaussian noise model. Then we compared the gate fidelities among qubit implementations due to pulse timing errors by using a realistic set of values for the error parameters of control amplitudes.