Theory of electron spin decoherence by interacting nuclear spins in a quantum dot

We propose an entanglement mechanism of nuclear spins in quantum dots driven by the electric current accompanied by the spin flip. This situation is relevant to a leakage current in spin-blocked regions where electrons cannot be transported unless their spins are flipped. The current gradually increases the components of larger total spin of nuclei. This correlation among the nuclear spins markedly enhances the spin-flip rate of electrons and hence the leakage current. The en...

A practical source of high fidelity entangled photons is desirable for quantum information applications and exploring quantum physics. Semiconductor quantum dots have recently been shown to conveniently emit entangled light when driven electrically, however the fidelity was not optimal. Here we show that the fidelity is not limited by decoherence, but by coherent interaction with nuclei. Furthermore we predict that on 100\mu s timescales, strongly enhanced fidelities could be...

We address the decoherence of a localized electron spin in an external magnetic field due to the hyperfine interaction with a lattice of nuclear spins. Using a completely non-perturbative method, rigorous bounds on the T_1 and T_2 coherence times for the electron spin are provided. It is shown that for magnetic fields B greater than some critical field B_c (B_c ~ .001 - 2 Tesla for the systems studied here), the z-polarization of the electron spin cannot relax, and hence T_1 ...

We study the dynamics of an electron spin in a graphene quantum dot, which is interacting with a bath of less than ten nuclear spins via the anisotropic hyperfine interaction. Due to substantial progress in the fabrication of graphene quantum dots, the consideration of such a small number of nuclear spins is experimentally relevant. This choice allows us to use exact diagonalization to calculate the longtime average of the electron spin as well as its decoherence time. We inv...

We propose a solid state based protocol to implement the universal quantum storage for electronic spin qubit. The quantum memory in this scheme is the spin wave excitation in the ring array of nuclei in a quantum dot. We show that the quantum information carried by an arbitrary state of the electronic spin can be coherently mapped onto the spin wave excitations or the magnon states. With an appropriate external control, the stored quantum state in quantum memory can be read o...

We study a large ensemble of nuclear spins interacting with a single electron spin in a quantum dot under optical excitation and photon detection. When a pair of applied laser fields satisfy two-photon resonance between the two ground electronic spin states, detection of light scattering from the intermediate exciton state acts as a weak quantum measurement of the effective magnetic (Overhauser) field due to the nuclear spins. If the spin were driven into a coherent populatio...

We numerically investigate the encoding and retrieval processes for a quantum memory realized in a semiconductor quantum dot, by focusing on the effect of inhomogeneously polarized nuclear spins whose polarization depends on the local hyperfine coupling strength. We find that the performance of the quantum memory is significantly improved by the inhomogeneous nuclear polarization, as compared to the homogeneous one. Moreover, the narrower the nuclear polarization distribution...

We present a brief overview of the current theoretical and experimental progresses in the study of quantum dot-based quantum computing schemes, then focus on the spin-based varieties, which are generally regarded as the most scalable because of the relatively long coherence times of electron and nuclear spins. Reviewed topics include spin coherence, spin interaction, spin detection, and the current status of the experimental studies of spin-based quantum computing.

The time-dependent Schrodinger equation of a many particle spin system consisting of an electron in a quantum dot interacting with the spins of the nuclei (N) in the dot due to hyperfine interaction is solved exactly for a given arbitrary initial state. The electron spin dynamics is then expressed in terms of the reduced density matrix of the composite system by computing the marginal density matrix of the electron. This is accomplished by classifying states of the system by ...

In a coupled double quantum dot system, we present a theory for the interplay between electron and nuclear spins when the two-electron singlet state is brought into resonance with one triplet state in moderate external magnetic field. We show that the quantum interference between first order and second order hyperfine processes can lead to a feedback mechanism for manipulating the nuclear hyperfine fields. In a uniform external field, positive and negative feedback controls c...