Modeling shallow confinement in tuneable quantum dots

TL;DR

This paper develops a universal microscopic model for shallow confinement in quantum dots, providing analytic and numerical tools to understand electron tunneling, capture fidelity, and quantum speed limits relevant for quantum technologies.

Contribution

It introduces a universal model for shallow confinement regimes, deriving scaling relations and quantum speed bounds applicable to single-electron devices.

Findings

Universal form of capture fidelity scaling relation.

Inference of energy scales from temperature and magnetic field dependence.

Quantum speed limit set by barrier height uncertainty.

Abstract

This paper proposes a universal microscopic model for the shallow confinement regime of single-electron tunneling devices. We consider particle escape from a quantum well generically emerging as a bifurcation in a smooth electrostatic potential and develop a set of analytic and numerical approximations for the ground-state tunneling and thermally activated escape rates. These approximations are applied to the problem of electron capture by a closing tunnel barrier where the competition between the closing speed and the escape rate defines a scaling relation for the capture fidelity. Effective one-dimensional cubic potential approximation leads to a universal form of this scaling relation in terms of device-independent dimensionless depth and speed parameters. Using predictions for temperature and magnetic-field dependence we show how to infer the energy scales of cubic longitudinal and quadratic transverse confinement. Finally, we derive an intrinsic quantum speed bound for adiabatic protection of the ground state tunneling and show that the latter can potentially be exploited up to the break down of confinement with a practical speed limit set by reaching the quantum uncertainty of the barrier height before the onset of non-adiabatic excitation. These results contribute to mapping out the physical limits of single-electron quantum technologies for electrical metrology and sensing.