Role of anisotropic confining potential and elliptical driving in dynamics of a Ge hole qubit

TL;DR

This paper investigates how elliptical confinement and polarization of driving fields influence the Rabi frequency of a heavy-hole qubit in a Ge quantum dot, revealing conditions for optimal qubit operation and limitations due to orbital level interference.

Contribution

It provides analytical expressions for the Rabi frequency considering anisotropic confinement and polarization effects, and identifies parameter regimes for effective qubit control in Ge quantum dots.

Findings

Rabi frequency depends on confinement shape and polarization alignment.

Optimal Rabi frequencies occur when polarization and confinement axes are aligned.

Higher orbital levels limit squeezing and qubit operation near boundaries.

Abstract

The squeezing of a Ge planar quantum dot enhances the Rabi frequency of electric dipole spin resonance by several orders of magnitude due to a strong Direct Rashba spin-orbit interaction in such geometries (Bosco et al 2021 Phys. Rev. B 104 115425). We investigate the geometric effect of an elliptical (squeezed) confinement and its interplay with the polarization of driving field in determining the Rabi frequency of a heavy-hole qubit in a planar Ge quantum dot. To calculate the Rabi frequency, we consider only the p-linear SOIs viz. electron-like Rashba, hole-like Rashba and hole-like Dresselhaus which are claimed to be the dominant ones by recent studies on planar Ge heterostructures. We derive approximate analytical expressions of the Rabi frequency using a Schrieffer-Wolff transformation for small SOI and driving strengths. Firstly, for an out-of-plane magnetic field with magnitude B, we get an operating region with respect to B, squeezing and polarization parameters where the qubit can be operated to obtain 'clean' Rabi flips. On and close to the boundaries of the region, the higher orbital levels strongly interfere with the two-level qubit subspace and destroy the Rabi oscillations, thereby putting a limitation on squeezing of the confinement. The Rabi frequency shows different behaviour for electron-like and hole-like Rashba SOIs. It vanishes for right (left) circular polarization in presence of purely electron-like (hole-like) Rashba SOI in a circular confinement. For both in- and out-of-plane magnetic fields, higher Rabi frequencies are achieved for squeezed configurations when the ellipses of polarization and the confinement equipotential have their major axes aligned but with different eccentricities. We also deduce a simple formula to calculate the effective heavy hole mass by measuring the Rabi frequencies using this setup.