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All-electric control of donor nuclear spin qubits in silicon

Nature Nanotechnology volume 12, pages 958–962 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

The electronic and nuclear spin degrees of freedom of donor impurities in silicon form ultra-coherent two-level systems1,2 that are potentially useful for applications in quantum information3 and are intrinsically compatible with industrial semiconductor processing. However, because of their smaller gyromagnetic ratios, nuclear spins are more difficult to manipulate than electron spins and are often considered too slow for quantum information processing. Moreover, although alternating current magnetic fields are the most natural choice to drive spin transitions and implement quantum gates, they are difficult to confine spatially to the level of a single donor, thus requiring alternative approaches. In recent years, schemes for all-electrical control of donor spin qubits have been proposed4,5 but no experimental demonstrations have been reported yet. Here, we demonstrate a scalable all-electric method for controlling neutral 31P and 75As donor nuclear spins in silicon. Using coplanar photonic bandgap resonators, we drive Rabi oscillations on nuclear spins exclusively using electric fields by employing the donor-bound electron as a quantum transducer, much in the spirit of recent works with single-molecule magnets6. The electric field confinement leads to major advantages such as low power requirements, higher qubit densities and faster gate times. Additionally, this approach makes it possible to drive nuclear spin qubits either at their resonance frequency or at its first subharmonic, thus reducing device bandwidth requirements. Double quantum transitions7 can be driven as well, providing easy access to the full computational manifold of our system and making it convenient to implement nuclear spin-based qudits using 75As donors8.

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Figure 1: Microwave photonic bandgap resonator design and performance.
Figure 2: 28Si sample details.
Figure 3: NMR spectroscopy using either electric or magnetic fields.
Figure 4: Time-domain measurements of the 31P and 75As nuclear spins subject to an electrical drive.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank G. Pica, J.J.L. Morton and P. Bertet for insightful discussions. Work at Princeton was supported by the NSF through the Princeton MRSEC (grant no. DMR-01420541) and by the ARO (grant bo. W911NF-13-1-0179). Work at LBNL was performed under the auspices of the US Department of Energy under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, 08544, New Jersey, USA

    Anthony J. Sigillito, Alexei M. Tyryshkin, Andrew A. Houck & Stephen A. Lyon

  2. Accelerator Technology and Applied Physics Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, 94720, California, USA

    Thomas Schenkel

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  1. Anthony J. Sigillito
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Contributions

A.J.S., A.M.T. and S.A.L. conceived and designed the experiments. A.J.S. and A.A.H. designed the photonic bandgap resonators. T.S. supplied the samples. A.J.S. performed the experiments and modelling. A.J.S., A.M.T. and S.A.L. wrote the paper, with input from all authors.

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Correspondence to Anthony J. Sigillito.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Sigillito, A., Tyryshkin, A., Schenkel, T. et al. All-electric control of donor nuclear spin qubits in silicon. Nature Nanotech 12, 958–962 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2017.154

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