Auxiliary-level-assisted operations with charge qubits in semiconductors

Abstract

We present a new scheme for rotations of a charge qubit associated with a singly ionized pair of donor atoms in a semiconductor host. The logical states of such a qubit proposed recently by Hollenberg et al. [16] are defined by the lowest two energy states of the remaining valence electron localized around one or another donor. We show that an electron located initially at one donor site can be transferred to another donor site via an auxiliary molecular level formed upon the hybridization of the excited states of two donors. The electron transfer is driven by a single resonant microwave pulse in the case where the energies of the lowest donor states coincide or by two resonant pulses in the case where they differ from each other. Depending on the pulse parameters, various one-qubit operations—including the phase gate, the NOT gate, and the Hadamard gate—can be realized in short times. Decoherence of an electron due to the interaction with acoustic phonons is analyzed and shown to be weak enough for coherent qubit manipulation to be possible, at least in proof-of-principle experiments on one-qubit devices.