Abstract:Silicon is vital to the computing industry due to the high quality of its native oxide and well-established doping technologies. Isotopic purification has enabled quantum coherence times on the order of seconds, thereby placing silicon at the forefront of efforts to create a solid state quantum processor. We demonstrate strong coupling of a single electron in a silicon double quantum dot to the photonic field of a microwave cavity, as shown by the observation of vacuum Rabi splitting. Strong coupling of a quantum dot electron to a cavity photon would allow for long-range qubit coupling and the long-range entanglement of electrons in semiconductor quantum dots.

There has been rapidly growing interest in hybrid quantum devices involving a solid-state spin and a macroscopic mechanical oscillator. Such hybrid devices create exciting opportunities to mediate interactions between disparate qubits and to explore the quantum regime of macroscopic mechanical objects. In particular, a system consisting of the nitrogen-vacancy defect center in diamond coupled to a high quality factor mechanical oscillator is an appealing candidate for such a hybrid quantum device, as it utilizes the highly coherent and versatile spin properties of the defect center. In this paper, we will review recent experimental progress on diamond-based hybrid quantum devices in which the spin and orbital dynamics of single defects are driven by the motion of a mechanical oscillator. In addition, we discuss prospective applications for this device, including long range, phonon-mediated spin-spin interactions, and phonon cooling in the quantum regime. We conclude the review by evaluating the experimental limitations of current devices and identifying alternative device architectures that may reach the strong coupling regime. Acknowledgments 24References 25 arXiv:1609.00418v2 [quant-ph]

We demonstrate a hybrid device architecture where the charge states in a double quantum dot (DQD) formed in a Si/SiGe heterostructure are read out using an on-chip superconducting microwave cavity. A quality factor Q = 5,400 is achieved by selectively etching away regions of the quantum well and by reducing photon losses through low-pass filtering of the gate bias lines. Homodyne measurements of the cavity transmission reveal DQD charge stability diagrams and a charge-cavity coupling rate g c /2π = 23 MHz. These measurements indicate that electrons trapped in a Si DQD can be effectively coupled to microwave photons, potentially enabling coherent electron-photon interactions in silicon.

Hybrid quantum devices, in which disparate quantum elements are combined in order to achieve enhanced functionality, have received much attention in recent years due to their exciting potential to address key problems in quantum information processing, communication, and control. Specifically, significant progress has been made in the field of hybrid mechanical devices, in which a qubit is coupled to a mechanical oscillator. Strong coupling in such devices has been demonstrated with superconducting qubits, and coupling defect qubits to mechanical elements via crystal strain has enabled novel methods of qubit measurement and control. In this paper we demonstrate the fabrication of diamond optomechanical crystals with embedded nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers, a preliminary step toward reaching the quantum regime with defect qubit hybrid mechanical devices. We measure optical and mechanical resonances of diamond optomechanical crystals as well as the spin coherence of single embedded NV centers. We find that the spin has long coherence times T 2 * = 1.5 µs and T 2 = 72 µs despite its proximity to nanofabricated surfaces. Finally, we discuss potential improvements of these devices and prospects for future experiments in the quantum regime.

We perform detailed magnetotransport studies on two-dimensional electron gases (2DEGs) formed in undoped Si/SiGe heterostructures in order to identify the electron mobility limiting mechanisms in this increasingly important materials system. By analyzing data from 26 wafers with different heterostructure growth profiles we observe a strong correlation between the background oxygen concentration in the Si quantum well and the maximum mobility. The highest quality wafer supports a 2DEG with mobility µ = 160,000 cm 2 /Vs at a density n = 2.17 ×10 11 /cm 2 and exhibits a metalto-insulator transition at a critical density nc = 0.46 × 10 11 /cm 2 . We extract a valley splitting ∆v ∼ 150 µeV at a magnetic field B = 1.8 T. These results provide evidence that undoped Si/SiGe heterostructures are suitable for the fabrication of few-electron quantum dots.