29Si nuclear spins as a resource for donor spin qubits in silicon

Abstract

Nuclear spin registers in the vicinity of electron spins in solid state systems offer a powerful resource to address the challenge of scalability in quantum architectures. We investigate here the properties of ^29 Si nuclear spins surrounding donor atoms in silicon, and consider the use of such spins, combined with the donor nuclear spin, as a quantum register coupled to the donor electron spin. We find the coherence of the nearby ^29 Si nuclear spins is effectively protected by the presence of the donor electron spin, leading to coherence times in the second timescale—over two orders of magnitude greater than the coherence times in bulk silicon. We theoretically investigate the use of such a register for quantum error correction (QEC), including methods to protect nuclear spins from the ionisation/neutralisation of the donor, which is necessary for the re-initialisation of the ancillae qubits. This provides a route for multi-round QEC using donors in silicon.

Keywords

• nuclear spins
• decoherence
• quantum error correction
• donors in silicon