Compressively strained Ge quantum wells in planar SiGe/Ge heterostructures are the state-of-the-art platform for hole spin qubits. While they exhibit robust coherence times, they possess weak intrinsic spin-orbit interaction (SOI) due to the heavy-hole (HH) character of the wavefunction. Recently, light-hole (LH) qubits were proposed in GeSn/Ge heterostructures, offering strong, intrinsic, linear-in-momentum SOI. In this work, we propose a switchable HH-LH spin qubit in a bilayer Ge heterostructure with SiGeSn barriers, combining the advantages of HH and LH devices. The character of the qubit can be changed by shuttling from an LH well to an HH well, which also enables fast, hopping-based single-qubit rotations. Additionally, we observe an HH-LH resonance introduced by the in-plane confinement, resulting in
g-factor peaks and first-order charge noise sweet spots. Our calculations reveal a sweet spot with Rabi frequencies on the order of 100 MHz, comparable to the LH regime, but with a more than tenfold increase in coherence time, on the order of 100
μs.
The selective confinement of light holes (LHs) is demonstrated by introducing a low-dimensional system consisting of a highly tensile-strained Ge quantum well enabling the design of an ultrafast gate-defined spin qubit under the electric dipole spin resonance. The qubit size-dependent
g factor and dipole moment are mapped, and the parameters inducing their modulation are discussed. It is found that the LH qubit dipole moment is two to three orders of magnitude higher than that of the canonical heavy-hole qubit. This behavior originates from the significant spin splitting resulting from the combined action of large cubic and linear Rashba spin-orbit interactions that are peculiar to LHs. The qubit relaxation rate is also affected by the strong spin-orbit interaction and follows typically a
B7 behavior. The proposed all-group IV, direct band-gap LH qubit provides an effective platform for a scalable qubit-optical photon interface sought after for long-range entanglement distribution and quantum networks.
Two-dimensional (2D) electron/hole gases confined in semiconductor heterostructures suffer from weak Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC) for manipulating spin degreee of freedom via an electric rather than a magnetic field. Here, we show that complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology-accessible strain could substantially enhance the linear Rashba SOC of the top hole subband in Ge/SiGe quantum wells (QWs) to a level comparable to that of 2D Rashba materials through enhancing the mixture of the light-hole and heavy-hole bands. We further show that strongly enhanced Rashba SOC boosts the Rabi frequency of hole spin qubits confined in Ge/SiGe QWs by two orders of magnitude to an unprecedented 40 GHz, more than one order of magnitude faster than other qubit platforms. We also demonstrate that the hole spin rotation with Rabi frequency > 25 GHz enters a new regime being immune to gate control-induced electric noise, opening a new avenue to simultaneously improve the gate speed and gate fidelity. Our findings provide a new routine to substantially enhance the Rashba SOC in 2D semiconductor hole gases to a level that is great for spintronic applications.
Intrinsic spin--orbit interaction in germanium provides electrically active flopping-mode qubits without requiring magnetic-field gradients to generate spin--charge hybridization. We study double quantum dots (DQDs) with a multiband Luttinger--Kohn framework that retains heavy-hole (HH) and light-hole (LH) states on equal footing. Modeling vertical confinement with a finite confinement potential along the growth direction brings selected subbands into a regime of appreciable HH--LH mixing. This admixture activates electric-dipole spin-coupling through LH--LH and LH--HH transitions, complementing the conventional HH--HH pseudospin-flip resonance. For the parameter sets considered, these additional channels can produce larger spin--photon figures of merit than the HH--HH transition. HH--LH mixing thus supplies a tunable ingredient for qubit--cavity coupling in germanium hole-spin qubits and extends the operating regimes available to circuit-QED architectures.
High-purity germanium (Ge) has re-emerged as a versatile semiconductor platform for spin-based quantum information processing because it combines mature materials processing, access to spin-free isotopes, high mobilities, small effective masses, and strong but engineerable spin--orbit coupling. However, ``Ge qubits'' are not a single technology. Donor spin qubits, acceptor spin qubits, gate-defined hole spin qubits, and gate-defined electron spin qubits exploit different parts of the Ge band structure and therefore make distinct trade-offs among coherence, controllability, fabrication complexity, and scalability. Here we compare these four Ge-based spin-qubit modalities on a common physical and architectural footing. We review the shared Ge materials physics, including isotopic purification, the multivalley
L-point conduction band, the spin-
3/2 valence band, heavy-hole/light-hole mixing, strain, interfaces, disorder, and phonons. We also introduce a common framework for estimating phononic-crystal-modified
T1 using a calibrated reference relaxation rate, a geometry-dependent strain-density-of-states suppression factor, and parasitic relaxation channels. The comparison shows that gate-defined Ge hole-spin qubits currently offer the strongest combination of all-electrical control, demonstrated multiqubit operation, and scalability. Donor, acceptor, and gate-defined electron qubits remain important complementary directions for memory, hybrid, and exploratory architectures. Overall, Ge supports a diverse qubit ecosystem, with gate-defined hole-spin qubits presently providing the clearest path toward scalable Ge-based quantum processors.
Planar germanium heterostructures hosting hole-spin qubits are among the leading platforms for scalable semiconductor-based quantum computing. Yet, device performance is hindered by significant quantum dot variability, which leads to uncertainty in qubit energy levels and random orientations of the spin quantization axis. Tailored control of the g-tensor offers a strategy to overcome these limitations and achieve more reliable qubit operations. Here, we introduce a flexible optimization framework for engineering g-tensor properties. As a benchmark, we numerically obtain the optimal reshaping of the out-of-plane potential in a SiGe-Ge-SiGe quantum well to suppress the in-plane g-tensor components and realize the recently proposed gapless single-spin qubit encoding. This reshaping is achieved through heterostructure engineering, specifically by adjusting the silicon concentration within the quantum well, though the framework remains readily adaptable to alternative design objectives. Our results provide practical design principles for improving the tunability of the spin response, paving the way towards large-scale germanium-based quantum computers.