Publications

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Quantum materials have long promised to revolutionize everything from energy transmission (high temperature superconductors) to both quantum and classical information systems (topological materials). However, their discovery and application has proceeded in an Edisonian fashion due to both an incomplete theoretical understanding and the difficulty of growing and purifying new materials. This project leverages Sandia's unique atomic precision advanced manufacturing (APAM) capability to design small-scale tunable arrays (designer materials) made of donors in silicon. Their low-energy electronic behavior can mimic quantum materials, and can be tuned by changing the fabrication parameters for the array, thereby enabling the discovery of materials systems which can't yet be synthesized. In this report, we detail three key advances we have made towards development of designer quantum materials. First are advances both in APAM technique and underlying mechanisms required to realize high-yielding donor arrays. Second is the first-ever observation of distinct phases in this material system, manifest in disordered 2D sheets of donors. Finally are advances in modeling the electronic structure of donor clusters and regular structures incorporating them, critical to understanding whether an array is expected to show interesting physics. Combined, these establish the baseline knowledge required to manifest the strongly-correlated phases of the Mott-Hubbard model in donor arrays, the first step to deploying APAM donor arrays as analogues of quantum materials.

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We present the fabrication of nano-magnet arrays, comprised of two sets of interleaving SmCo5 and Co nano-magnets, and the subsequent development and implementation of a protocol to program the array to create a one-dimensional rotating magnetic field. We designed the array based on the microstructural and magnetic properties of SmCo5 films annealed under different conditions, also presented here. Leveraging the extremely high contrast in coercivity between SmCo5 and Co, we applied a sequence of external magnetic fields to program the nano-magnet arrays into a configuration with alternating polarization, which based on simulations creates a rotating magnetic field in the vicinity of nano-magnets. Our proof-of-concept demonstration shows that complex, nanoscale magnetic fields can be synthesized through coercivity contrast of constituent magnetic materials and carefully designed sequences of programming magnetic fields.

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Even as today's most prominent spin-based qubit technologies are maturing in terms of capability and sophistication, there is growing interest in exploring alternate material platforms that may provide advantages, such as enhanced qubit control, longer coherence times, and improved extensibility. Recent advances in heterostructure material growth have opened new possibilities for employing hole spins in semiconductors for qubit applications. Undoped, strained Ge/SiGe quantum wells are promising candidate hosts for hole spin-based qubits due to their low disorder, large intrinsic spin-orbit coupling strength, and absence of valley states. Here, we use a simple one-layer gated device structure to demonstrate both a single quantum dot as well as coupling between two adjacent quantum dots. The hole effective mass in these undoped structures, m∗ ∼ 0.08 m 0, is significantly lower than for electrons in Si/SiGe, pointing to the possibility of enhanced tunnel couplings in quantum dots and favorable qubit-qubit interactions in an industry-compatible semiconductor platform.

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In the field of semiconductor quantum dot spin qubits, there is growing interest in leveraging the unique properties of hole-carrier systems and their intrinsically strong spin-orbit coupling to engineer novel qubits. Recent advances in semiconductor heterostructure growth have made available high quality, undoped Ge/SiGe quantum wells, consisting of a pure strained Ge layer flanked by Ge-rich SiGe layers above and below. These quantum wells feature heavy hole carriers and a cubic Rashba-type spin-orbit interaction. Here, we describe progress toward realizing spin qubits in this platform, including development of multi-metal-layer gated device architectures, device tuning protocols, and charge-sensing capabilities. Iterative improvement of a three-layer metal gate architecture has significantly enhanced device performance over that achieved using an earlier single-layer gate design. We discuss ongoing, simulation-informed work to fine-tune the device geometry, as well as efforts toward a single-spin qubit demonstration.

In the field of semiconductor quantum dot spin qubits, there is growing interest in leveraging the unique properties of hole-carrier systems and their intrinsically strong spin-orbit coupling to engineer novel qubits. Recent advances in semiconductor heterostructure growth have made available high quality, undoped Ge/SiGe quantum wells, consisting of a pure strained Ge layer flanked by Ge-rich SiGe layers above and below. These quantum wells feature heavy hole carriers and a cubic Rashba-type spin-orbit interaction. Here, we describe progress toward realizing spin qubits in this platform, including development of multi-metal-layer gated device architectures, device tuning protocols, and charge-sensing capabilities. Iterative improvement of a three-layer metal gate architecture has significantly enhanced device performance over that achieved using an earlier single-layer gate design. We discuss ongoing, simulation-informed work to fine-tune the device geometry, as well as efforts toward a single-spin qubit demonstration.

Recent interest in topological quantum computing has driven research into topological nanowires, one-dimensional quantum wires that support topological modes, including Majorana fermions. Most topological nanowire designs rely on materials with strong spin-orbit coupling, such as InAs or InSb, used in combination with superconductors. It would be advantageous to fabricate topological nanowires with Si owing to its mature technology. However, the intrinsic spin-orbit coupling in Si is weak. One approach that could circumvent this material deficiency is to rotate the electron spins with nanomagnets. Here we perform detailed simulations of realistic Si/SiGe systems with an artificial spin-orbit gap induced by a nanomagnet array. Most of our results are generalizable to other nanomagnet-based topological nanowire designs. By studying several concrete examples, we gain insight into the effects of nanomagnet arrays, leading to design rules and guidelines. In particular, we develop a recipe for eliminating unwanted gaps that result from realistic nanomagnet designs. Lastly, we present an experimentally realizable design using magnets with a single polarization.

Gate-controllable spin-orbit coupling is often one requisite for spintronic devices. For practical spin field-effect transistors, another essential requirement is ballistic spin transport, where the spin precession length is shorter than the mean free path such that the gate-controlled spin precession is not randomized by disorder. In this letter, we report the observation of a gate-induced crossover from weak localization to weak anti-localization in the magneto-resistance of a high-mobility two-dimensional hole gas in a strained germanium quantum well. From the magneto-resistance, we extract the phase-coherence time, spin-orbit precession time, spin-orbit energy splitting, and cubic Rashba coefficient over a wide density range. The mobility and the mean free path increase with increasing hole density, while the spin precession length decreases due to increasingly stronger spin-orbit coupling. As the density becomes larger than ∼6 × 1011 cm-2, the spin precession length becomes shorter than the mean free path, and the system enters the ballistic spin transport regime. We also report here the numerical methods and code developed for calculating the magneto-resistance in the ballistic regime, where the commonly used HLN and ILP models for analyzing weak localization and anti-localization are not valid. These results pave the way toward silicon-compatible spintronic devices.

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Holes in germanium-rich heterostructures provide a compelling alternative for achieving spin based qubits compared to traditional approaches such as electrons in silicon. In this project, we addressed the question of whether holes in Ge/SiGe quantum wells can be confined into laterally defined quantum dots and made into qubits. Through this effort, we successfully fabricated and operated single-metal-layer quantum dot devices in Ge/SiGe in multiple devices. For single quantum dots, we measured the capacitances of the quantum dot to the surface electrodes and find that they reasonably compare to expected values based on the electrode dimensions, suggested that we have formed a lithographic quantum dot. We also compare the results to detailed self-consistent calculations of the expected potential. Finally, we demonstrate, for the first time, a double quantum dot in the Ge/SiGe material system.

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There has been much interest in leveraging the topological order of materials for quantum information processing. Among the various solid-state systems, one-dimensional topological superconductors made out of strongly spin-orbit-coupled nanowires have been shown to be the most promising material platform. In this project, we investigated the feasibility of turning silicon, which is a non-topological semiconductor and has weak spin-orbit coupling, into a one-dimensional topological superconductor. Our theoretical analysis showed that it is indeed possible to create a sizable effective spin-orbit gap in the energy spectrum of a ballistic one-dimensional electron channel in silicon with the help of nano-magnet arrays. Experimentally, we developed magnetic materials needed for fabricating such nano-magnets, characterized the magnetic behavior at low temperatures, and successfully demonstrated the required magnetization configuration for opening the spin-orbit gap. Our results pave the way toward a practical topological quantum computing platform using silicon, one of the most technologically mature electronic materials.