Isotope sensitive measurement of the hole-nuclear spin interaction in quantum dots

TL;DR

This study measures isotope-specific hyperfine interactions in quantum dots, revealing sign variations and a new decoherence mechanism, advancing understanding of hole-nuclear spin dynamics for quantum computing.

Contribution

It provides the first isotope selective measurements of hole hyperfine constants, uncovering sign changes and a new spin flip mechanism in quantum dots.

Findings

Hole hyperfine constants vary in sign across isotopes.

D-orbital contributions influence hole-nuclear interactions.

A new hole-nuclear spin flip mechanism is identified.

Abstract

Decoherence caused by nuclear field fluctuations is a fundamental obstacle to the realization of quantum information processing using single electron spins. Alternative proposals have been made to use spin qubits based on valence band holes having weaker hyperfine coupling. However, it was demonstrated recently both theoretically and experimentally that the hole hyperfine interaction is not negligible, although a consistent picture of the mechanism controlling the magnitude of the hole-nuclear coupling is still lacking. Here we address this problem by performing isotope selective measurement of the valence band hyperfine coupling in InGaAs/GaAs, InP/GaInP and GaAs/AlGaAs quantum dots. Contrary to existing models we find that the hole hyperfine constant along the growth direction of the structure (normalized by the electron hyperfine constant) has opposite signs for different isotopes and ranges from -15% to +15%. We attribute such changes in hole hyperfine constants to the competing positive contributions of p-symmetry atomic orbitals and the negative contributions of d-orbitals. Furthermore, we find that the d-symmetry contribution leads to a new mechanism for hole-nuclear spin flips which may play an important role in hole spin decoherence. In addition the measured hyperfine constants enable a fundamentally new approach for verification of the computed Bloch wavefunctions in the vicinity of nuclei in semiconductor nanostructures.