Undoped Strained Ge Quantum Well with Ultrahigh Mobility Grown by Reduce Pressure Chemical Vapor Deposition

TL;DR

This paper reports the fabrication of an undoped strained Ge quantum well with ultrahigh hole mobility over 2 million cm²/Vs, achieved through a novel growth process, enabling tunable quantum effects for quantum computing applications.

Contribution

It introduces a new growth technique using reduced pressure chemical vapor deposition to produce high-mobility undoped Ge quantum wells with sharp interfaces and tunable strain.

Findings

Achieved hole mobility over 2E6 cm²/Vs at low percolation density.

Observed tunable fractional quantum Hall effect at high densities and magnetic fields.

Demonstrated potential for quantum computing due to strain-tunable spin-orbit coupling.

Abstract

We fabricate an undoped Ge quantum well under 30 nm Ge0.8Si0.2 shallow barrier with reverse grading technology. The under barrier is deposited by Ge0.8Si0.2 followed by Ge0.9Si0.1 so that the variation of Ge content forms a sharp interface which can suppress the threading dislocation density penetrating into undoped Ge quantum well. And the Ge0.8Si0.2 barrier introduces enough in-plane parallel strain -0.41% in the Ge quantum well. The heterostructure field-effect transistors with a shallow buried channel get a high two-dimensional hole gas (2DHG) mobility over 2E6 cm2/Vs at a low percolation density of 2.51 E-11 cm2. We also discover a tunable fractional quantum Hall effect at high densities and high magnetic fields. This approach defines strained germanium as providing the material basis for tuning the spin-orbit coupling strength for fast and coherent quantum computation.