APS March Meeting Abstracts
One-spin quantum logic gates from the exchange interaction and a global magnetic field
Lian-Ao Wu, Daniel A. Lidar, Mark G. Friesen
Abstract
The construction of a solid-state quantum computer remains a coveted, yet elusive goal. Among the most promising scalable candidates are the spin-based approaches, where qubits are represented by electron spins in quantum dots, or by donor-atom nuclear or electron spins, or by combinations thereof. It has been widely assumed that one-qubit gates in these systems, which are based on single-spin addressing, suffer from severe technical difficulties, including slow speed of operation, heating, and device and materials complexity, such as g-factor engineering. For this reason a variety of approaches have been suggested to circumvent one-qubit gates, including encoding the state of a qubit into two or more spins. These approaches inevitably introduce substantial overhead. Here we show that one-qubit gates can in fact be generated using only modest and presently feasible technological requirements. Our solution uses only global magnetic fields and controllable Heisenberg exchange interactions, thus circumventing the need for single-spin addressing. We explicitly show how to build up one-qubit gates from these components using simple pulse sequences. This should substantially simplify the implemention of spin-based solid state quantum computers.