Quantum computing with antiferromagnetic spin clusters

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that antiferromagnetic spin clusters can serve as effective qubits, allowing quantum operations with control techniques similar to single spins, and discusses their energy properties and potential advantages.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of spin cluster qubits with antiferromagnetic interactions, showing they can be manipulated without intracluster exchange control and analyzing their energy gaps and decoherence scaling.

Findings

Energy gap calculations for logical qubit states

Quantum gate operation times determined by matrix elements

Decoherence time scaling with cluster size

Abstract

We show that a wide range of spin clusters with antiferromagnetic intracluster exchange interaction allows one to define a qubit. For these spin cluster qubits, initialization, quantum gate operation, and readout are possible using the same techniques as for single spins. Quantum gate operation for the spin cluster qubit does not require control over the intracluster exchange interaction. Electric and magnetic fields necessary to effect quantum gates need only be controlled on the length scale of the spin cluster rather than the scale for a single spin. Here, we calculate the energy gap separating the logical qubit states from the next excited state and the matrix elements which determine quantum gate operation times. We discuss spin cluster qubits formed by one- and two-dimensional arrays of s=1/2 spins as well as clusters formed by spins s>1/2. We illustrate the advantages of spin cluster qubits for various suggested implementations of spin qubits and analyze the scaling of decoherence time with spin cluster size.