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arXiv:2608.25914

Switchable heavy-hole/light-hole spin qubit

Zoltán György, Dmitry Miserev, Jelena Klinovaja, Daniel Loss

cond-mat.mes-hallquant-phSubmitted Aug 26, 2026• Announced Aug 27, 2026
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Abstract

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 $μ$s.

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arXiv:2510.05301•Materials for Quantum Technology•Feb 2, 2026•0 citations
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 ggg-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 μμμs.
Strained germanium (ε\varepsilonε-Ge) quantum wells on metamorphic SiGe buffers have enabled advanced hole-based spin qubit devices. Alternatively, unstrained Ge with lattice-matched strained silicon-germanium (ε\varepsilonε-SiGe) barriers eliminates the need for metamorphic buffers altogether. The ground state character of both these platforms is predominantly heavy-hole (HH) with a largely anisotropic spin response. We propose and study an alternative heterostructure, lattice-matched to Ge, in which both the SiGe quantum well and barriers are tensile strained, with their composition contrast providing the band offset for confinement and the tensile strain stabilizing a light-hole (LH) ground state. We show large spin-orbit coupling (SOC), both linear and cubic, along with a significantly more isotropic spin response compared to strained HH qubits. We also study the decoherence properties of the proposed device, showing an appreciable gain in the quality factor compared to their HH counterparts. Finally, we propose a bilayer heterostructure that allows for electrical switching between HH and LH ground state character.
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.
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.
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 ggg 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{B}^{7}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.
Hole spin qubits provide one of the leading platforms for spin-based quantum computing due to their large intrinsic spin-orbit interaction (SOI), which enables fast electrical manipulation. The SOI of planar quantum dots has mostly been investigated in theoretical studies by examining the SOI already present in the two-dimensional hole gas (2DHG). Here, we study the SOI created by the in-plane confinement by deriving non-perturbative effective Hamiltonians numerically for hole spin qubits. We find that the quantum geometry of the 2DHG naturally emerges, leading to a meaningful non-perturbative definition of pseudospin valid far away from the ΓΓΓ-point. The SOI of the 2DHG and of the in-plane confinement have different forms; therefore, they cannot be turned off simultaneously, ruining the perfect spin-orbit switch functionality of spin qubits. We construct effective Hamiltonians using the symmetry approach for various low-dimensional hole systems: (i) a heavy-hole confined in a SiGe/Ge/SiGe heterostructure, (ii) a light-hole confined in SnGe/Ge, (iii) a gate-defined nanowire in SiGe/Ge/SiGe, and (iv) a hole confined in a Ge/Si core/shell nanowire. The non-perturbative effective Hamiltonians provide results with excellent agreement with the full Hamiltonians.
Abstract Spin qubits in semiconductor quantum dots offer a gate-tunable platform for quantum information processing. While two-qubit interactions are typically realized through exchange coupling between neighboring spins, coupling spin qubits to photons via hybrid spin-circuit QED (cQED) devices enables long-range interactions and integration with other cQED platforms. Here, we investigate hole spin–photon coupling in compact single quantum dot setups. By incorporating ubiquitous strain inhomogeneities to our theory, we identify three main spin–photon coupling channels: a vector-potential-spin–orbit geometric mechanism–dominant for vertical magnetic fields–, an inhomogeneous Rashba term generalizing previous spin–orbit field models, and strain-induced g -tensor terms–most relevant for in-plane fields. Comparing Si, unstrained (relaxed) Ge, and biaxially strained Ge wells, we find that Si and unstrained Ge provide optimal coupling strengths (tens of MHz) thanks to their reduced heavy-hole, light-hole splitting. We demonstrate efficient switching of the spin–photon coupling while preserving sweet spot conditions by operating with an in-plane magnetic field. Finally, we evaluate quantum state transfer and two-qubit gate protocols, achieving ≳ 99 % fidelity for state transfer and > 90 % for two-qubit gates with realistic coherence times, establishing single-dot hole spins as a viable platform for compact spin-cQED architectures and highlighting unstrained Ge as a promising candidate for spin–photon interactions.