Atomic Engineering of Molecular Qubits for High-Speed, High-Fidelity Single Qubit Gates.

Universal quantum computing requires fast single- and two-qubit gates with individual qubit addressability to minimize decoherence errors during processor operation. Electron spin qubits using individual phosphorus donor atoms in silicon have demonstrated long coherence times with high fidelities, providing an attractive platform for scalable quantum computing. While individual qubit addressability has been demonstrated by controlling the hyperfine interaction between the electron and nuclear wave function in a global magnetic field, the small hyperfine Stark coefficient of 0.34 MHz/MV m-1 achieved to date has limited the speed of single quantum gates to ∼42 µs to avoid rotating neighboring qubits due to power broadening from the antenna. The use of molecular 2P qubits with more than one donor atom has not only demonstrated fast (0.8 ns) two-qubit SWAP gates and long spin relaxation times of ∼30 s but provides an alternate way to achieve high selectivity of the qubit resonance frequency. Here, we show in two different devices that by placing the donors with comparable interatomic spacings (∼0.8 nm) but along different crystallographic axes, either the [110] or [310] orientations using STM lithography, we can engineer the hyperfine Stark shift from 1 MHz/MV m-1 to 11.2 MHz/MV m-1, respectively, a factor of 10 difference. NEMO atomistic calculations show that larger hyperfine Stark coefficients of up to ∼70 MHz/MV m-1 can be achieved within 2P molecules by placing the donors ≥5 nm apart. When combined with Gaussian pulse shaping, we show that fast single qubit gates with 2π rotation times of 10 ns and ∼99% fidelity single qubit operations are feasible without affecting neighboring qubits. By increasing the single qubit gate time to ∼550 ns, two orders of magnitude faster than previously measured, our simulations confirm that >99.99% single qubit control fidelities are achievable.

Implementation of a quantum metamaterial using superconducting qubits.

The key issue for the implementation of a metamaterial is to demonstrate the existence of collective modes corresponding to coherent oscillations of the meta-atoms. Atoms of natural materials interact with electromagnetic fields as quantum two-level systems. Artificial quantum two-level systems can be made, for example, using superconducting nonlinear resonators cooled down to their ground state. Here we perform an experiment in which 20 of these quantum meta-atoms, so-called flux qubits, are embedded into a microwave resonator. We observe the dispersive shift of the resonator frequency imposed by the qubit metamaterial and the collective resonant coupling of eight qubits. The realized prototype represents a mesoscopic limit of naturally occurring spin ensembles and as such we demonstrate the AC-Zeeman shift of a resonant qubit ensemble. The studied system constitutes the implementation of a basic quantum metamaterial in the sense that many artificial atoms are coupled collectively to the quantized mode of a photon field.