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Benjamin Venitucci

Modeling of the electrical manipulation of hole spin qubits in silicon

Published on 25 November 2020
Thesis presented November 25, 2020

Abstract:
Spin quantum bits (qubits) are devices in which information is stored as a coherent superposition of two spin states of a particle. One of the perspectives of these devices is to exploit a massive parallelism allowed by such a superposition of solutions. The CEA Grenoble is studying in particular hole spin qubits in silicon, because their electrical manipulation is easier than electron qubits thanks to the strong spin-orbit coupling of the valence bands. This thesis thus focuses on the modeling of the electrical manipulation of these hole qubits. First of all, we introduce the k.p methods that describe the valence bands structure of silicon, and which allow to build numerical and analytical models. Then we present the experiments carried out by CEA Grenoble on these qubits derived from CMOS technologies. These experiments reveal the strong magnetic anisotropy of the Larmor and Rabi frequency, which respectively characterise the dynamic and the manipulation of the qubit. We introduce a gyromagnetic matrix formalism that completely describe these two frequencies. In addition, we show how symmetries impact the shape of this matrix, and how they explain the magnetic anisotropy of qubits. Next, we identify through numerical simulation, the microscopic mechanisms underlying the electrical manipulation of spin, which then allow us to build a minimal model for hole qubits. This model demonstrates that silicon is an ideal host material for a such qubit thanks to the strong anisotropy of its valence bands. Finally, we study numerically the impact of phonons on the lifetime of hole qubits. We show that the relaxation time is large enough to perform tens of thousand of operations despite the strong spin-orbit coupling.

Keywords:
Quantum information, Computational physics, Theoretical physics, Quantum bits, Silicon, Spin

On-line thesis