Single-shot readout of an electron spin in silicon

By A. Morello, J. Pla, F. Zwanenburg, K. Chan, K. Tan, H. Huebl, Mikko Möttönen, C. Nugroho, Changyi Yang, J. Donkelaar and 6 more. Nature, 2010

633 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The size of silicon transistors used in microelectronic devices is shrinking to the level at which quantum effects become important. Although this presents a significant challenge for the further scaling of microprocessors, it provides the potential for radical innovations in the form of spin-based quantum computers and spintronic devices. An electron spin in silicon can represent a well-isolated quantum bit with long coherence times because of the weak spin–orbit coupling and the possibility of eliminating nuclear spins from the bulk crystal. However, the control of single electrons in silicon has proved challenging, and so far the observation and manipulation of a single spin has been impossible. Here we report the demonstration of single-shot, time-resolved readout of an electron spin in silicon. This has been performed in a device consisting of implanted phosphorus donors coupled to a metal-oxide-semiconductor single-electron transistor—compatible with current microelectronic technology. We observed a spin lifetime of ∼6 seconds at a magnetic field of 1.5 tesla, and achieved a spin readout fidelity better than 90 per cent. High-fidelity single-shot spin readout in silicon opens the way to the development of a new generation of quantum computing and spintronic devices, built using the most important material in the semiconductor industry.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9d810a05aa9d5646cc1578b5723bf66ba1543de0

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Citations in the corpus

Silicon quantum electronics (2012, methodology): “44 High-fidelity spin read-out of a P-donor-bound electron in Si has recently been demonstrated within this architecture (Morello et al., 2010) by implanting a small number of P donors in the vicinity of an electrostatically induced SET, at the Si-SiO2 interface.”
Storing quantum information for 30 seconds in a nanoelectronic device. (2014, methodology): “The electric field couples to the qubit energy levels by Stark-shifting the hyperfine constant A [14–16] and/or the g-factor of the electron spin [17].”
A single-atom electron spin qubit in silicon (2012, neutral): “[8].”
Hybrid quantum circuits: Superconducting circuits interacting with other quantum systems (2012, background): “For example, phosphorous impurities in silicon (Kane, 1998; Morello et al., 2010) and nitrogen-vacancy (NV) color centers in diamond (Doherty et al., 2012; Wrachtrup and Jelezko, 2006) possess good coherence properties, which allow long storage times.”
Single-electron current sources: towards a refined definition of ampere (2012, methodology): “This kind of electron transport can potentially be used to transport single spins working as quantum bits in a spin-based quantum computer (Hanson et al., 2007; Morello et al., 2010).”