Spin qubit quantum computer
The spin qubit quantum computer is a quantum computer based on controlling the spin of charge carriers (electrons and electron holes) in semiconductor devices.
[1] The first spin qubit quantum computer was first proposed by Daniel Loss and David P. DiVincenzo in 1997,.
[1][2] The proposal was to use the intrinsic spin-1/2 degree of freedom of individual electrons confined in quantum dots as qubits.
This should not be confused with other proposals that use the nuclear spin as qubit, like the Kane quantum computer or the nuclear magnetic resonance quantum computer.
Earlier work on applications of quantum dots for quantum computing was done by Barenco et al.[4] The Loss–DiVincenzo quantum computer operates, basically, using inter-dot gate voltage for implementing swap operations and local magnetic fields (or any other local spin manipulation) for implementing the controlled NOT gate (CNOT gate).
The swap operation is achieved by applying a pulsed inter-dot gate voltage, so the exchange constant in the Heisenberg Hamiltonian becomes time-dependent: This description is only valid if:
We can choose a specific duration of the pulse such that the integral in time over
) results in a square root of swap gate,
operator is a conditional phase shift (controlled-Z) for the state in the basis of
Spin qubits mostly have been implemented by locally depleting two-dimensional electron gases in semiconductors such a gallium arsenide,[5][6] and germanium.
[7] Spin qubits have also been implemented in other material systems such as graphene.
[8] A more recent development is using silicon spin qubits, an approach that is e.g. pursued by Intel.
[9][10] The advantage of the silicon platform is that it allows using modern semiconductor device fabrication for making the qubits.
Some of these devices have a comparably high operation temperature of a few kelvins (hot qubits) which is advantageous for scaling the number of qubits in a quantum processor.
