Engineering local strain for single-atom nuclear acoustic resonance in silicon

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a device that uses local mechanical strain to coherently control a single nuclear spin in silicon via nuclear acoustic resonance, enabling precise quantum manipulation.

Contribution

The authors design and optimize a silicon-compatible nanoelectronic device that employs dynamical strain to achieve nuclear spin control through NAR, predicting significant Rabi frequencies.

Findings

Predicted NAR Rabi frequencies of ~200 Hz for single $^{123}$Sb nuclei.

Electric field-driven spin transitions are suppressed, isolating pure NAR effects.

Extended predictions to other donors and isotopes using DFT-calculated tensors.

Abstract

Mechanical strain plays a key role in the physics and operation of nanoscale semiconductor systems, including quantum dots and single-dopant devices. Here we describe the design of a nanoelectronic device where a single nuclear spin is coherently controlled via nuclear acoustic resonance (NAR) through the local application of dynamical strain. The strain drives spin transitions by modulating the nuclear quadrupole interaction. We adopt an AlN piezoelectric actuator compatible with standard silicon metal-oxide-semiconductor processing, and optimize the device layout to maximize the NAR drive. We predict NAR Rabi frequencies of order 200 Hz for a single $^{123}$Sb nucleus in a wide region of the device. Spin transitions driven directly by electric fields are suppressed in the center of the device, allowing the observation of pure NAR. Using electric field gradient-elastic tensors calculated by density-functional theory, we extend our predictions to other high-spin group-V donors in silicon, and to the isoelectronic $^{73}$Ge atom.