Long distance qubit-qubit coupling in silicon quantum dots

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Abstract: I study the interaction between quantum mechanical spins controllably trapped in small regions known as quantum dots at the interfaces of a semiconductor, such as silicon, and and an insulator. Even though the electric field of an electron is spherical, electrons have orientation, the spin. Spins can encode information, which can be controlled with the help of electric and magnetic fields. Electron spins in quantum dots can be studied in cold environments provided by so-called dilution refrigerators, which cool them and their immediate environment down very close to absolute zero. Such cold temperatures are required to differentiate the faint signals transmitted by these tiny particles from the ones caused by inevitably noisy environment. To fully process the information contained in spins, they need to interact with one another in a well-defined manner. I study an interaction which can be seen as an interplay of two facts. First, two electrons repel each other due to both having a charge with the same signature. Second, two electrons with exactly the same energy and orientation cannot occupy exactly the same physical space. In systems where two nearby electrons are trapped, they repeatedly swap their spin orientations with one another. This effect is known as the exchange interaction. It turns out that the outer electrons in a system of three or more quantum dot electrons can also interact via spin exchange. We aim to apply this effect to demonstrate qubit-qubit interactions over distances that are long compared to quantum dot sizes. In particular, we aim to study the controllability and quality of the resulting two-qubit gates. If sufficiently strong and controllable, such and interaction would be a helpful step towards realising scalable qubit processors.