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arXiv:cond-mat/0402368 · Physical Review B

Electrical current noise of a beamsplitter as a test of spin entanglement

Peter Samuelsson, Eugene V. Sukhorukov, Μ. Büttiker

Published Sep 28, 2004• 52 citations

Abstract

We investigate the spin entanglement in the superconductor-quantum dot system proposed by Recher, Sukhorukov, and Loss, coupling it to an electronic beamsplitter. The superconductor-quantum dot entangler and the beamsplitter are treated within a unified framework and the entanglement is detected via current correlations. The state emitted by the entangler is found to be a linear superposition of nonlocal spin singlets at different energies, a spin-entangled two-particle wave packet. Colliding the two electrons in the beamsplitter, the singlet spin state gives rise to a bunching behavior, detectable via the current correlators. The amount of bunching depends on the relative positions of the single particle levels in the quantum dots and the scattering amplitudes of the beamsplitter. It is found that the bunching-dependent part of the current correlations is of the same magnitude as the part insensitive to bunching, making an experimental detection of the entanglement feasible. The spin entanglement is insensitive to orbital dephasing but suppressed by spin dephasing. A lower bound for the concurrence, conveniently expressed in terms of the Fano factors, is derived. A detailed comparison between the current correlations of the nonlocal spin-singlet state and other states, possibly emitted by the entangler, is performed. This provides conditions for an unambiguous identification of the nonlocal singlet spin entanglement.

DOI: 10.1103/physrevb.70.115330

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Entanglement acts as a fundamental resource for many applications in quantum communication. We propose and theoretically analyze methods for preparing and detecting entanglement between the spins of electrons in a mesoscopic environment. The entanglement production mechanism which we present is based on two quantum dots coupled to a superconductor from which paired electrons are injected via Andreev tunneling. The spin-correlated electrons can then hop from the quantum dots into normal leads. For detection we propose to measure the shot noise which is produced by the entangled electrons after they have passed a beam splitter. The enhancement of the noise by a factor of two turns out to be a unique signature for the spin singlet, a maximally entangled state. In a different setting, the entangled ground state in two tunnel-coupled quantum dots is detected via the Aharonov–Bohm oscillations in the co-tunneling current.

We propose and analyze a spin-entangler for electrons based on an s-wave superconductor coupled to two quantum dots, each of which is coupled to normal Fermi leads. We show that in the presence of a voltage bias and in the Coulomb blockade regime two correlated electrons provided by the Andreev process can coherently tunnel from the superconductor via different dots into different leads. The spin singlet coming from the Cooper pair remains preserved in this process, and the setup provides a source of mobile and nonlocal spin-entangled electrons. The transport current is calculated and shown to be dominated by a two-particle Breit-Wigner resonance that allows the injection of two spin-entangled electrons into different leads at exactly the same orbital energy, which is a crucial requirement for the detection of spin entanglement via noise measurements. The coherent tunneling of both electrons into the same lead is suppressed by the on-site Coulomb repulsion and/or the superconducting gap, while the tunneling into different leads is suppressed through the initial separation of the tunneling electrons. In the regime of interest the particle-hole excitations of the leads are shown to be negligible. The Aharonov-Bohm oscillations in the current are shown to contain single- and two-electron periods with amplitudes that both vanish with increasing Coulomb repulsion albeit differently fast.

Addressing the feasibility of quantum communication with entangled electrons in an interacting many-body environment, we propose an interference experiment using a scattering setup with an entangler and a beam splitter. It is shown that, due to electron-electron interaction, the spin correlation of the entangled singlet and triplet states is reduced by

{z}_{F}^{2}

in a conductor described by Fermi liquid theory. We calculate the quasiparticle weight factor

{z}_{F}

for a two-dimensional electron system. The current noise for electronic singlet states turns out to be enhanced (bunching behavior), while it is reduced for triplet states (antibunching). Within standard scattering theory, we find that the Fano factor (noise-to-current ratio) for singlets is twice as large as for independent classical particles and is reduced to zero for triplets.

Charge and spin current correlations are analyzed in a source of spin-entangled electrons built from a superconductor and two quantum dots in parallel. In addition to the ideal (crossed Andreev) channel, parasitic channels (direct Andreev and cotunneling) and spin flip processes are fully described in a density matrix framework. The way they reduce both the efficiency and the fidelity of the entangler is quantitatively described by analyzing the zero-frequency noise correlations of charge current as well as spin current in the two output branches. Spin current noise is characterized by a spin Fano factor, equal to 0 (total current noise) and $\ensuremath{-}1$ (crossed correlations) for an ideal entangler. The violation of the Bell inequalities, as a test of nonlocality (entanglement) of split pairs, is formulated in terms of the correlations of electron charge and spin numbers counted in a specific time window $\ensuremath{\tau}$. The efficiency of the test is analyzed, comparing $\ensuremath{\tau}$ to the various time scales in the entangler operation.

We investigate quantum noise effect on the transportation of nonlocal Cooper pairs across the realistic Andreev entangler which consists of an s-wave superconductor coupled to two small quantum dots at resonance which themselves are coupled to normal leads. The noise emerges due to voltage fluctuations felt by the electrons residing on the two dots as a result of the finite resistances in the gate leads or of any resistive lead capacitively coupled to the dots. In the ideal noiseless case, the setup provides a trustable source of mobile and nonlocal spin-entangled electrons and the transport is dominated by a two-particle Breit-Wigner resonance that allows the injection of two spin-entangled electrons into different leads at the same energy [P. Recher, E. V. Sukhorukov, and D. Loss, Phys. Rev. B 63, 165314 (2001)]. We seek to revisit the transport of those nonlocal Cooper pairs as well as the efficiency of such an Andreev entangler when including the quantum noise (decoherence).

We review our recent work towards quantum communication in a solid-state environment with qubits carried by electron spins. We propose three schemes to produce spin-entangled electrons, where the required separation of the partner electrons is achieved via Coulomb interaction. The non-product spin-states originate either from the Cooper pairs found in a superconductor, or in the ground state of a quantum dot with an even number of electrons. In a second stage, we show how spin-entanglement carried by a singlet can be detected in a beam-splitter geometry by an increased (bunching) or decreased (antibunching) noise signal. We also discuss how a local spin-orbit interaction can be used to provide a continuous modulation of the noise as a signature of entanglement. Finally, we review how one can use a quantum dot as a spin-filter, a spin-memory read-out, a probe for single-spin decoherence and, ultimately, a single-spin measurement apparatus.