Bence Hetényi

An anomalous energy splitting of spin triplet states at zero magnetic field has recently been measured in germanium quantum dots. This zero-field splitting could crucially alter the coupling between tunnel-coupled quantum dots, the basic building blocks of state-of-the-art spin-based quantum processors, with profound implications for semiconducting quantum computers. We develop an analytical model linking the zero-field splitting to spin-orbit interactions that are cubic in momentum. Such interactions naturally emerge in hole nanostructures, where they can also be tuned by external electric fields, and we find them to be particularly large in silicon and germanium, resulting in a significant zero-field splitting in the μeV range. We confirm our analytical theory by numerical simulations of different quantum dots, also including other possible sources of zero-field splitting. Our findings are applicable to a broad range of current architectures encoding spin qubits and provide a deeper understanding of these materials, paving the way towards the next generation of semiconducting quantum processors.

We consider a hybrid quantum Hall-superconductor system, where a superconducting finger with oblique profile is wedged into a two-dimensional electron gas in the presence of a perpendicular magnetic field, as considered by Lee et al., Nat. Phys. 13, 693 (2017). The electron gas is in the quantum Hall regime at filling factor ν=1. Due to the Meissner effect, the perpendicular magnetic field close to the quantum Hall-superconductor boundary is distorted and gives rise to an in-plane component of the magnetic field. This component enables non-local crossed Andreev reflection between the spin-polarized chiral edge states running on opposite sides of the superconducting finger, thus opening a gap in the spectrum of the edge states without the need of spin-orbit interaction or non-trivial magnetic textures. We compute numerically the transport properties of this setup and show that a negative resistance exists as consequence of non-local Andreev processes. We also obtain numerically the zero-energy local density of states, which systematically shows peaks stable to disorder. The latter result is compatible with the emergence of Majorana bound states.

The strong spin-orbit coupling in hole spin qubits enables fast and electrically tunable gates, but at the same time enhances the susceptibility of the qubit to charge noise. Suppressing this noise is a significant challenge in semiconductor quantum computing. Here, we show theoretically that hole Si FinFETs are not only very compatible with modern CMOS technology, but they present operational sweet spots where the charge noise is completely removed. The presence of these sweet spots is a result of the interplay between the anisotropy of the material and the triangular shape of the FinFET cross-section, and it does not require an extreme fine-tuning of the electrostatics of the device. We present how the sweet spots appear in FinFETs grown along different crystallographic axes and we study in detail how the behaviour of these devices change when the cross-section area and aspect ratio are varied. We identify designs that maximize the qubit performance and could pave the way towards a scalable spin-based quantum computer.

The spin-orbit interaction lies at the heart of quantum computation with spin qubits, research on topologically non-trivial states, and various applications in spintronics. Hole spins in Ge/Si core/shell nanowires experience a spin-orbit interaction that has been predicted to be both strong and electrically tunable, making them a particularly promising platform for research in these fields. We experimentally determine the strength of spin-orbit interaction of hole spins confined to a double quantum dot in a Ge/Si nanowire by measuring spin-mixing transitions inside a regime of spin-blockaded transport. We find a remarkably short spin-orbit length of ∼65 nm, comparable to the quantum dot length and the interdot distance. We additionally observe a large orbital effect of the applied magnetic field on the hole states, resulting in a large magnetic field dependence of the spin-mixing transition energies. Strikingly, together with these orbital effects, the strong spin-orbit interaction causes a significant enhancement of the g-factor with magnetic field.The large spin-orbit interaction strength demonstrated is consistent with the predicted direct Rashba spin-orbit interaction in this material system and is expected to enable ultrafast Rabi oscillations of spin qubits and efficient qubit-qubit interactions, as well as provide a platform suitable for studying Majorana zero modes.

We study the exchange interaction between two hole-spin qubits in a double quantum dot setup in a silicon nanowire in the presence of magnetic and electric fields. Based on symmetry arguments we show that there exists an effective spin that is conserved even in highly anisotropic semiconductors, provided that the system has a twofold symmetry with respect to the direction of the applied magnetic field. This finding facilitates the definition of qubit basis states and simplifies the form of exchange interaction for two-qubit gates in coupled quantum dots. If the magnetic field is applied along a generic direction, cubic anisotropy terms act as an effective spin-orbit interaction introducing novel exchange couplings even for an inversion symmetric setup. Considering the example of a silicon nanowire double dot, we present the relative strength of these anisotropic exchange interaction terms and calculate the fidelity of the root-SWAP gate. Furthermore, we show that the anisotropy-induced spin-orbit effects can be comparable to that of the direct Rashba spin-orbit interaction for experimentally feasible electric field strengths.

The nuclear spin of a phosphorus atom in silicon has been used as a quantum bit in various quantum-information experiments. It has been proposed that this nuclear-spin qubit can be efficiently controlled by an ac electric field, when embedded in a two-electron dot-donor setup subject to intrinsic or artificial spin-orbit interaction. Exposing the qubit to control electric fields in that setup exposes it to electric noise as well. In this work, we describe the effect of electric noise mechanisms, such as phonons and 1/f charge noise, and estimate the corresponding decoherence timescales of the nuclear-spin qubit. We identify a promising parameter range where the electrical single-qubit operations are at least an order of magnitude faster then the decoherence. In this regime, decoherence is dominated by dephasing due to 1/f charge noise. Our results facilitate the optimized design of nanostructures to demonstrate electrically driven nuclear-spin resonance.