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Optical control of one and two hole spins in interacting quantum dots

Nature Photonics volume 5, pages 702–708 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

A single hole spin in a semiconductor quantum dot has emerged as a quantum bit that is potentially superior to an electron spin. A key feature of holes is that they have a greatly reduced hyperfine interaction with nuclear spins, which is one of the biggest difficulties in working with an electron spin. It is now essential to show that holes are viable for quantum information processing by demonstrating fast quantum gates and scalability. To this end, we have developed InAs/GaAs quantum dots coupled through coherent tunnelling and charged with controlled numbers of holes. We report fast, single-qubit gates using a sequence of short laser pulses. We then take the important next step towards scalability of quantum information by optically controlling two interacting hole spins in separate dots.

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Figure 1: Design of the experiment.
Figure 2: Bias-dependent spectroscopy.
Figure 3: Single hole spin control.
Figure 4: Two weakly interacting hole spins.
Figure 5: Two strongly interacting hole spins.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a Multi-University Research Initiative (US Army Research Office; W911NF0910406) and the US Office of Naval Research.

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Author notes

  1. Alex Greilich & Danny Kim

    Present address: Present address: Technische Universität Dortmund, 44221 Dortmund, Germany (A.G.); Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA (D.K.),

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, District of Columbia, 20375, USA

    Alex Greilich, Samuel G. Carter, Danny Kim, Allan S. Bracker & Daniel Gammon

  2. University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, 20742, USA

    Alex Greilich

  3. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48109, USA

    Danny Kim

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Contributions

All authors were involved in the conception of the work and in writing the manuscript. A.S.B. grew and processed the samples. A.G., S.G.C. and D.K. performed the optical measurements. A.G., S.G.C. and D.G. performed data analysis and modelling.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daniel Gammon.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Greilich, A., Carter, S., Kim, D. et al. Optical control of one and two hole spins in interacting quantum dots. Nature Photon 5, 702–708 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2011.237

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