Spatially-resolved decoherence of donor spins in silicon strained by a metallic electrode

TL;DR

This study maps the spatial coherence of near-surface donor spins in silicon, revealing how strain and surface impurities affect decoherence, and extends coherence times significantly using clock transitions.

Contribution

It introduces a method to spatially resolve spin coherence variations near interfaces in silicon, combining strain-induced shifts and clock transitions for detailed decoherence analysis.

Findings

Coherence times reach up to 300 ms at 100 nm depth.

Strain and surface impurities significantly impact spin decoherence.

The technique is applicable to various spin systems like diamond and silicon carbide.

Abstract

Electron spins are amongst the most coherent solid-state systems known, however, to be used in devices for quantum sensing and information processing applications, they must be typically placed near interfaces. Understanding and mitigating the impacts of such interfaces on the coherence and spectral properties of electron spins is critical to realize such applications, but is also challenging: inferring such data from single-spin studies requires many measurements to obtain meaningful results, while ensemble measurements typically give averaged results that hide critical information. Here, we report a comprehensive study of the coherence of near-surface bismuth donor spins in 28-silicon at millikelvin temperatures. In particular, we use strain-induced frequency shifts caused by a metallic electrode to make spatial maps of spin coherence as a function of depth and position relative to the electrode. By measuring magnetic-field-insensitive clock transitions we separate magnetic noise caused by surface spins from charge noise. Our results include quantitative models of the strain-split spin resonance spectra and extraction of paramagnetic impurity concentrations at the silicon surface. The interplay of these decoherence mechanisms for such near-surface electron spins is critical for their application in quantum technologies, while the combination of the strain splitting and clock transition extends the coherence lifetimes by up to two orders of magnitude, reaching up to 300 ms at a mean depth of only 100nm. The technique we introduce here to spatially map coherence in near-surface ensembles is directly applicable to other spin systems of active interest, such as defects in diamond, silicon carbide, and rare earth ions in optical crystals.