Coherent electron transport by adiabatic passage in an imperfect donor chain

TL;DR

This paper investigates how coherent electron transport via adiabatic passage in a triple donor chain in silicon is affected by fabrication imperfections, proposing correction schemes and deriving an effective model for realistic quantum computing architectures.

Contribution

It provides a detailed atomistic analysis of CTAP in imperfect donor chains, introduces correction schemes for misplacements, and derives an effective 3x3 model linking atomistic and simplified Hamiltonians.

Findings

Adiabatic pathways are sensitive to donor misplacements.

Correction schemes can mitigate effects of fabrication imperfections.

An effective 3x3 model accurately captures the system's behavior.

Abstract

Coherent Tunneling Adiabatic Passage (CTAP) has been proposed as a long-range physical qubit transport mechanism in solid-state quantum computing architectures. Although the mechanism can be implemented in either a chain of quantum dots or donors, a 1D chain of donors in Si is of particular interest due to the natural confining potential of donors that can in principle help reduce the gate densities in solid-state quantum computing architectures. Using detailed atomistic modeling, we investigate CTAP in a more realistic triple donor system in the presence of inevitable fabrication imperfections. In particular, we investigate how an adiabatic pathway for CTAP is affected by donor misplacements, and propose schemes to correct for such errors. We also investigate the sensitivity of the adiabatic path to gate voltage fluctuations. The tight-binding based atomistic treatment of straggle used here may benefit understanding of other donor nanostructures, such as donor-based charge and spin qubits. Finally, we derive an effective 3 \times 3 model of CTAP that accurately resembles the voltage tuned lowest energy states of the multi-million atom tight-binding simulations, and provides a translation between intensive atomistic Hamiltonians and simplified effective Hamiltonians while retaining the relevant atomic-scale information. This method can help characterize multi-donor experimental structures quickly and accurately even in the presence of imperfections, overcoming some of the numeric intractabilities of finding optimal eigenstates for non-ideal donor placements.