Coherently controlling robust spin-orbit qubits of electrons in nanowire quantum dots

Abstract

We consider an electron confined in a gated nanowire quantum dot (NQD) with arbitrarily strong spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and weak static magnetic field, and treat the latter as a perturbation to seek the maximal spin-motion entangled states with the exact general solutions of the perturbed equations. From the boundedness and self-consistent conditions of the general solutions we find two corrected energies to any n level of the unperturbed system with ground state n = 0, which are much less than the unperturbed level-difference and corresponds to a spin-orbit qubit. We demonstrate the metastability of the two-level states and the decoherence-averse effect of SOC, and suggest an alternative scheme to perform the qubit control, simply by adjusting the orientation of magnetic field for any fixed SOC. Such a adjustment can lead to the spin flipping of the state vector and the position exchanging of the probability-density wavepackets which can be proposed as the non-Abelian quasiparticles. The results could be directly extended to a weakly coupled array of NQDs for coherently encoding the robust spin-orbit qubits.