Long-time electron spin storage via dynamical suppression of hyperfine-induced decoherence in a quantum dot

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that dynamical decoupling sequences can significantly extend electron spin coherence times in quantum dots, even beyond traditional theoretical limits, with optimized protocols and consideration of real-world imperfections.

Contribution

The study analyzes high-level dynamical decoupling protocols using analytical and numerical methods, revealing their effectiveness in prolonging electron spin coherence beyond standard theoretical expectations.

Findings

Decoupling protocols can extend coherence time by up to 100 times.

Concatenated decoupling protocols outperform other methods.

Systematic control errors up to 5% still allow significant coherence enhancement.

Abstract

The coherence time of an electron spin decohered by the nuclear spin environment in a quantum dot can be substantially increased by subjecting the electron to suitable dynamical decoupling sequences. We analyze the performance of high-level decoupling protocols by using a combination of analytical and exact numerical methods, and by paying special attention to the regimes of large inter-pulse delays and long-time dynamics, which are outside the reach of standard average Hamiltonian theory descriptions. We demonstrate that dynamical decoupling can remain efficient far beyond its formal domain of applicability, and find that a protocol exploiting concatenated design provides best performance for this system in the relevant parameter range. In situations where the initial electron state is known, protocols able to completely freeze decoherence at long times are constructed and characterized. The impact of system and control non-idealities is also assessed, including the effect of intra-bath dipolar interaction, magnetic field bias and bath polarization, as well as systematic pulse imperfections. While small bias field and small bath polarization degrade the decoupling fidelity, enhanced performance and temporal modulation result from strong applied fields and high polarizations. Overall, we find that if the relative errors of the control parameters do not exceed 5%, decoupling protocols can still prolong the coherence time by up to two orders of magnitude.