Isotopically engineered Si and Ge for spintronics and quantum computation

Abstract

Si, Ge as well as SiGe structures are the promising materials for spintronics and quantum computation due to the fact that in both crystals only one isotope ( 29Si and 73Ge) has nuclear spin. As a result, isotope engineering of Si and Ge permits to control the density of nuclear spins and vary the spin coherence time, a crucial parameter in spintronics. In the first part we discuss the NMR study of nuclear spin decoherence in Ge single crystals with different abundance of the 73Ge isotope. It was observed that the slow component of the dephasing process is elongated with depletion of Ge crystal with isotope 73Ge. The second part is devoted to the development of the Kane's model of nuclear spin-based quantum computer, which uses the nuclear spin of 31P impurity atoms in a 28Si matrix as quantum bits (qubits). We discuss a new method of placing 31P atoms in a 28Si based on neutron-transmutation-doping of isotopically engineered Si and Ge. In the proposed structure, interqubit coupling is due to indirect hyperfine interaction of 31P nuclear spins with electrons localized in a 28Si quasi-one-dimensional nanowire, which allows one to control the coupling between distant qubits.