Letter abstract
Nature Physics 4, 780 - 784 (2008)
Published online: 10 August 2008 | doi:10.1038/nphys1052
Subject Categories: Quantum physics | Electronics, photonics and device physics | Materials physics
Ultrafast control of donor-bound electron spins with single detuned optical pulses
Kai-Mei C. Fu1, Susan M. Clark2, Charles Santori1, Colin R. Stanley3, M. C. Holland3 & Yoshihisa Yamamoto2,4
The ability to control spins in semiconductors is important in a variety of fields, including spintronics and quantum information processing. Due to the potentially fast dephasing times of spins in the solid state1, 2, 3, spin control operating on the picosecond timescale, or faster, may be necessary. Such speeds—which are not possible to reach with standard electron spin resonance techniques based on microwave sources—can be attained with broadband optical pulses. One promising ultrafast technique uses single broadband pulses detuned from resonance in a three-level 
system4. This technique is robust against optical-pulse imperfections and does not require a fixed optical reference phase. Here we demonstrate, theoretically and experimentally, the principle of coherent manipulation of spins using this approach. Spin rotations with areas exceeding 
/4 for a single pulse and /2 for two pulses are achieved for donor-bound electrons. This technique might find applications from basic solid-state electron spin resonance spectroscopy to arbitrary single-qubit rotations4, 5 and bang–bang control6 for quantum computation.
- Information and Quantum Systems Lab, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, 1501 Page Mill Road, MS1123, Palo Alto, California 94304, USA
- Edward L. Ginzton Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-4088, USA
- Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Oakfield Avenue, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8LT, UK
- National Institute of Informatics, 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430, Japan
Correspondence to: Kai-Mei C. Fu1 e-mail: kai-mei.fu@hp.com.
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