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Coulomb-mediated antibunching of an electron pair surfing on sound

Nature Nanotechnology volume 18, pages 721–726 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Electron flying qubits are envisioned as potential information links within a quantum computer, but also promise—like photonic approaches—to serve as self-standing quantum processing units. In contrast to their photonic counterparts, electron-quantum-optics implementations are subject to Coulomb interactions, which provide a direct route to entangle the orbital or spin degree of freedom. However, controlled interaction of flying electrons at the single-particle level has not yet been established experimentally. Here we report antibunching of a pair of single electrons that is synchronously shuttled through a circuit of coupled quantum rails by means of a surface acoustic wave. The in-flight partitioning process exhibits a reciprocal gating effect which allows us to ascribe the observed repulsion predominantly to Coulomb interaction. Our single-shot experiment marks an important milestone on the route to realize a controlled-phase gate for in-flight quantum manipulations.

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Fig. 1: Experimental set-up.
Fig. 2: Delay-controlled sending and in-flight partitioning.
Fig. 3: Antibunching at synchronized transport.
Fig. 4: Coulomb-induced detuning and electron-pair partitioning.
Fig. 5: Barrier dependence of antibunching rate.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available online from the Zenodo repository at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7472518. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge fruitful discussions with V. Kashcheyevs and E. Pavlovska. J.W. acknowledges the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement number 754303. A.R. acknowledges financial support from ANR-21-CMAQ-0003, France 2030, project QuantForm-UGA. T.K. and S.T. acknowledge financial support from JSPS KAKENHI grant number 20H02559. W.P., J.S. and H.-S.S. acknowledge support from Korea NRF via the SRC Center for Quantum Coherence in Condensed Matter (grant number 2016R1A5A1008184). C.B. acknowledges financial support from the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), project QUABS ANR-21-CE47-0013-01. This project has received funding from the European Union’s H2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 862683 ‘UltraFastNano’.

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Author notes

  1. Jeongmin Shim

    Present address: Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics, Center for NanoScience, and Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Institut Néel, Grenoble, France

    Junliang Wang, Hermann Edlbauer, Aymeric Richard, Matias Urdampilleta, Tristan Meunier, Hermann Sellier & Christopher Bäuerle

  2. Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Shunsuke Ota & Tetsuo Kodera

  3. National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), National Metrology Institute of Japan (NMIJ), Tsukuba, Japan

    Shunsuke Ota, Nobu-Hisa Kaneko & Shintaro Takada

  4. Department of Physics, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, South Korea

    Wanki Park, Jeongmin Shim & Heung-Sun Sim

  5. Lehrstuhl für Angewandte Festkörperphysik, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Arne Ludwig & Andreas D. Wieck

  6. Université Grenoble Alpes, CEA, INAC-Pheliqs, Grenoble, France

    Xavier Waintal

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Contributions

J.W. performed the experiment with support from H.E., A.R. and S.O. and with input from T.K., N.-H.K., M.U., T.M., H.-S.S., H.S., S.T. and C.B. J.W. fabricated the sample. A.L. and A.D.W. provided the high-quality GaAs/GaAlAs heterostructure. X.W. developed the Bayesian model with support from H.E. and J.W. W.P., J.S. and H.-S.S. developed the exact diagonalization method. J.W. and H.E. wrote the manuscript with feedback from all authors. S.T. and C.B. supervised the experimental work.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christopher Bäuerle.

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Supplementary sections 1–7 and Figs. 1–7.

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Wang, J., Edlbauer, H., Richard, A. et al. Coulomb-mediated antibunching of an electron pair surfing on sound. Nat. Nanotechnol. 18, 721–726 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-023-01368-5

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