Molecular formations and spectra due to electron correlations in three-electron hybrid double-well qubits

Abstract

We show that systematic full configuration-interaction (FCI) calculations enable prediction of the energy spectra and the intrinsic spatial and spin structures of the many-body wave functions as a function of the detuning parameter for the case of three-electron hybrid qubits based on GaAs asymmetric double quantum dots. Specifically, in comparison with the case of weak interactions and treating the entire three-electron double-dot hybrid qubit as an integral unit, it is shown that the predicted spectroscopic patterns, originating from strong electron correlations, manifest the formation of Wigner molecules (WMs). Signatures of WM formation include: (1) a strong suppression of the energy gaps relative to the non-interacting-electrons modeling, and (2) the appearance of a pair of avoided crossings arising between states associated with two-electron occupancies in the left and right wells. The Wigner molecule is a physical entity associated with electron localization within each well and it cannot be captured by the previously employed independent-particle or two-site-Hubbard theoretical modeling of the hybrid qubits. The emergence of strong WMs is investigated in depth through the concerted use of FCI-adapted diagnostic tools like charge and spin densities, as well as conditional probability distributions. Furthermore, the energy spectrum as a function of the strength of the Coulomb repulsion (at constant detuning) is calculated in order to complement the thorough analysis of the factors contributing to WM emergence. We report remarkable agreement with recent experimental measurements. The present FCI methodology for multi-well quantum dots can be straightforwardly extended to treat valleytronic two-band Si/SiGe hybrid qubits, where the central role of the WMs was confirmed recently.