Published papers

© 2019 OSA. We image the stray magnetic field of commercial chemically functionalized ferromagnetic cobalt nanoparticles using optically detected magnetic resonance of a near-surface ensemble of nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond.

© 2019, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. Spin qubits created from gate-defined silicon metal–oxide–semiconductor quantum dots are a promising architecture for quantum computation. The high single qubit fidelities possible in these systems, combined with quantum error correcting codes, could potentially offer a route to fault-tolerant quantum computing. To achieve fault tolerance, however, gate error rates must be reduced to below a certain threshold and, in general, correlated errors must be removed. Here we show that pulse engineering techniques can be used to reduce the average Clifford gate error rates for silicon quantum dot spin qubits down to 0.043%. This represents a factor of three improvement over state-of-the-art silicon quantum dot devices and extends the randomized benchmarking coherence time to 9.4 ms. By including tomographically complete measurements in our randomized benchmarking, we infer a higher-order feature of the noise called the unitarity, which measures the coherence of noise. This, in turn, allows us to theoretically predict that average gate error rates as low as 0.026% may be achievable with further pulse improvements. These spin qubit fidelities are ultimately limited by incoherent noise, which we attribute to charge noise from the silicon device structure or the environment.

© 2020, This is a U.S. government work and not under copyright protection in the U.S.; foreign copyright protection may apply. Nuclear spins are highly coherent quantum objects. In large ensembles, their control and detection via magnetic resonance is widely exploited, for example, in chemistry, medicine, materials science and mining. Nuclear spins also featured in early proposals for solid-state quantum computers1 and demonstrations of quantum search2 and factoring3 algorithms. Scaling up such concepts requires controlling individual nuclei, which can be detected when coupled to an electron4–6. However, the need to address the nuclei via oscillating magnetic fields complicates their integration in multi-spin nanoscale devices, because the field cannot be localized or screened. Control via electric fields would resolve this problem, but previous methods7–9 relied on transducing electric signals into magnetic fields via the electron–nuclear hyperfine interaction, which severely affects nuclear coherence. Here we demonstrate the coherent quantum control of a single 123Sb (spin-7/2) nucleus using localized electric fields produced within a silicon nanoelectronic device. The method exploits an idea proposed in 196110 but not previously realized experimentally with a single nucleus. Our results are quantitatively supported by a microscopic theoretical model that reveals how the purely electrical modulation of the nuclear electric quadrupole interaction results in coherent nuclear spin transitions that are uniquely addressable owing to lattice strain. The spin dephasing time, 0.1 seconds, is orders of magnitude longer than those obtained by methods that require a coupled electron spin to achieve electrical driving. These results show that high-spin quadrupolar nuclei could be deployed as chaotic models, strain sensors and hybrid spin-mechanical quantum systems using all-electrical controls. Integrating electrically controllable nuclei with quantum dots11,12 could pave the way to scalable, nuclear- and electron-spin-based quantum computers in silicon that operate without the need for oscillating magnetic fields.

© 2020, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. Quantum computers are expected to outperform conventional computers in several important applications, from molecular simulation to search algorithms, once they can be scaled up to large numbers—typically millions—of quantum bits (qubits)1–3. For most solid-state qubit technologies—for example, those using superconducting circuits or semiconductor spins—scaling poses a considerable challenge because every additional qubit increases the heat generated, whereas the cooling power of dilution refrigerators is severely limited at their operating temperature (less than 100 millikelvin)4–6. Here we demonstrate the operation of a scalable silicon quantum processor unit cell comprising two qubits confined to quantum dots at about 1.5 kelvin. We achieve this by isolating the quantum dots from the electron reservoir, and then initializing and reading the qubits solely via tunnelling of electrons between the two quantum dots7–9. We coherently control the qubits using electrically driven spin resonance10,11 in isotopically enriched silicon1228Si, attaining single-qubit gate fidelities of 98.6 per cent and a coherence time of 2 microseconds during ‘hot’ operation, comparable to those of spin qubits in natural silicon at millikelvin temperatures13–16. Furthermore, we show that the unit cell can be operated at magnetic fields as low as 0.1 tesla, corresponding to a qubit control frequency of 3.5 gigahertz, where the qubit energy is well below the thermal energy. The unit cell constitutes the core building block of a full-scale silicon quantum computer and satisfies layout constraints required by error-correction architectures8,17. Our work indicates that a spin-based quantum computer could be operated at increased temperatures in a simple pumped 4He system (which provides cooling power orders of magnitude higher than that of dilution refrigerators), thus potentially enabling the integration of classical control electronics with the qubit array18,19.