Spectral properties of a hybrid-qubit model based on a two-dimensional quantum dot

Abstract

The design and study of hybrid qubits is driven by their ability to get along the best of charge qubits and of spin qubits, {\em i.e.} the speed of operation of the former and the very slow decoherence rates of the latter ones. There are several proposals to implement hybrid qubits, this works focuses on the spectral properties of an one-electron hybrid qubit. By design, the information would be stored in the electronic spin and the switching between the qubit basis states would be achieved using an external ac electric field. The electron is confined in a two-dimensional quantum dot, whose confining potential is given by a quartic potential, features that are typical of GaAS quantum dots. Besides the confining potential that characterizes the quantum dot there are two static magnetic fields applied to the system, one is a large constant Zeeman field and the other one has a constant gradient. We study the spectral properties of the model Hamiltonian, a Scrödinger-Pauli Hamiltonian with realistic parameters, using the Ritz method. In particular, we look for regions of the parameter space where the lowest eigenenergies and their eigenfunctions allow to define a qubit which is stable under perturbations to the design parameters. We put special attention to the constraints that the design imposes over the magnetic fields, the tuning of the energy gap between the qubit states and the expectation value of the spin operator where the information would be stored.