We consider the initialization of the spin state of a single electron trapped in a self-assembled quantum dot via optical pumping of a trion level. We show that with a magnetic field applied perpendicular to the growth direction of the dot, a near-unity fidelity can be obtained in a time equal to a few times the inverse of the spin-conserving trion relaxation rate. This method is several orders of magnitude faster than with the field aligned parallel, since this configuration must rely on a slow hole spin-flip mechanism. This increase in speed does result in a limit on the maximum obtainable fidelity, but we show that for InAs dots, the error is very small.
We present an all-optical implementation of quantum computation using semiconductor quantum dots. Quantum memory is represented by the spin of an excess electron stored in each dot. Two-qubit gates are realized by switching on trion-trion interactions between different dots. State selectivity is achieved via conditional laser excitation exploiting Pauli exclusion principle. Read out is performed via a quantum-jump technique. We analyze the effect on our scheme's performance of the main imperfections present in real quantum dots: exciton decay, hole mixing, and phonon decoherence. We introduce an adiabatic gate procedure that allows one to circumvent these effects and evaluate quantitatively its fidelity.
The excitation of electron spin polarization and coherence by picosecond light pulses and their dynamics in a wide remotely doped quantum well are studied theoretically and experimentally. Assuming that all electrons in the quantum well are localized, the theory considers the resonant interaction of light pulses with the four-level system formed by the electron spins of the ground state and the hole spins of the trion excited state. The theory describes the effects of spontaneous emission, a transverse magnetic field and hole spin relaxation on the dynamics detected by the Kerr rotation of a probe pulse. Time resolved Kerr rotation experiments were carried out on a remotely doped
14nm GaAs quantum well in the frequency range of optical transitions to the heavy hole (HH) trion and to the light-hole (LH) trion degenerate with the HH exciton. The experiments on the resonant excitation of the HH trion show a very slow heavy hole spin relaxation and, consequently, a weak electron spin polarization after the trion relaxation. In contrast, the resonant excitation of the LH trion/HH exciton results in a fast hole spin relaxation that increases electron spin polarization.