arXiv subjects

J. J. Pla

Publications and source records attributed to J. J. Pla.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

Development of an Undergraduate Quantum Engineering Degree

Quantum technology is exploding. Computing, communication, and sensing are just a few areas likely to see breakthroughs in the next few years. Worldwide, national governments, industries, and universities are moving to create a new class of workforce - the Quantum Engineers. Demand for such engineers is predicted to be in the tens of thousands within a five-year timescale. However, how best to train this next generation of engineers is far from obvious. Quantum mechanics - long a pillar of traditional physics undergraduate degrees - must now be merged with traditional engineering offerings. This paper discusses the history, development, and first year of operation of the world's first undergraduate degree in quantum engineering. The main purpose of the paper is to inform the wider debate, now being held by many institutions worldwide, on how best to formally educate the Quantum Engineer.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2021

Coherent control of electron spin qubits in silicon using a global field

Silicon spin qubits promise to leverage the extraordinary progress in silicon nanoelectronic device fabrication over the past half century to deliver large-scale quantum processors. Despite the scalability advantage of using silicon technology, realising a quantum computer with the millions of qubits required to run some of the most demanding quantum algorithms poses several outstanding challenges, including how to control so many qubits simultaneously. Recently, compact 3D microwave dielectric resonators were proposed as a way to deliver the magnetic fields for spin qubit control across an entire quantum chip using only a single microwave source. Although spin resonance of individual electrons in the globally applied microwave field was demonstrated, the spins were controlled incoherently. Here we report coherent Rabi oscillations of single electron spin qubits in a planar SiMOS quantum dot device using a global magnetic field generated off-chip. The observation of coherent qubit control driven by a dielectric resonator establishes a credible pathway to achieving large-scale control in a spin-based quantum computer.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2021

Single-electron spin resonance in a nanoelectronic device using a global field

Spin-based silicon quantum electronic circuits offer a scalable platform for quantum computation, combining the manufacturability of semiconductor devices with the long coherence times afforded by spins in silicon. Advancing from current few-qubit devices to silicon quantum processors with upwards of a million qubits, as required for fault-tolerant operation, presents several unique challenges, one of the most demanding being the ability to deliver microwave signals for large-scale qubit control. Here we demonstrate a potential solution to this problem by using a three-dimensional dielectric resonator to broadcast a global microwave signal across a quantum nanoelectronic circuit. Critically, this technique utilizes only a single microwave source and is capable of delivering control signals to millions of qubits simultaneously. We show that the global field can be used to perform spin resonance of single electrons confined in a silicon double quantum dot device, establishing the feasibility of this approach for scalable spin qubit control.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2021

Spatially-resolved decoherence of donor spins in silicon strained by a metallic electrode

Electron spins are amongst the most coherent solid-state systems known, however, to be used in devices for quantum sensing and information processing applications, they must be typically placed near interfaces. Understanding and mitigating the impacts of such interfaces on the coherence and spectral properties of electron spins is critical to realize such applications, but is also challenging: inferring such data from single-spin studies requires many measurements to obtain meaningful results, while ensemble measurements typically give averaged results that hide critical information. Here, we report a comprehensive study of the coherence of near-surface bismuth donor spins in 28-silicon at millikelvin temperatures. In particular, we use strain-induced frequency shifts caused by a metallic electrode to make spatial maps of spin coherence as a function of depth and position relative to the electrode. By measuring magnetic-field-insensitive clock transitions we separate magnetic noise caused by surface spins from charge noise. Our results include quantitative models of the strain-split spin resonance spectra and extraction of paramagnetic impurity concentrations at the silicon surface. The interplay of these decoherence mechanisms for such near-surface electron spins is critical for their application in quantum technologies, while the combination of the strain splitting and clock transition extends the coherence lifetimes by up to two orders of magnitude, reaching up to 300 ms at a mean depth of only 100nm. The technique we introduce here to spatially map coherence in near-surface ensembles is directly applicable to other spin systems of active interest, such as defects in diamond, silicon carbide, and rare earth ions in optical crystals.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

Strain-induced spin resonance shifts in silicon devices

In spin-based quantum information processing devices, the presence of control and detection circuitry can change the local environment of a spin by introducing strain and electric fields, altering its resonant frequencies. These resonance shifts can be large compared to intrinsic spin line-widths and it is therefore important to study, understand and model such effects in order to better predict device performance. Here we investigate a sample of bismuth donor spins implanted in a silicon chip, on top of which a superconducting aluminium micro-resonator has been fabricated. The on-chip resonator provides two functions: first, it produces local strain in the silicon due to the larger thermal contraction of the aluminium, and second, it enables sensitive electron spin resonance spectroscopy of donors close to the surface that experience this strain. Through finite-element strain simulations we are able to reconstruct key features of our experiments, including the electron spin resonance spectra. Our results are consistent with a recently discovered mechanism for producing shifts of the hyperfine interaction for donors in silicon, which is linear with the hydrostatic component of an applied strain.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2017

Magnetic resonance with squeezed microwaves

Vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field set a fundamental limit to the sensitivity of a variety of measurements, including magnetic resonance spectroscopy. We report the use of squeezed microwave fields, which are engineered quantum states of light for which fluctuations in one field quadrature are reduced below the vacuum level, to enhance the detection sensitivity of an ensemble of electronic spins at millikelvin temperatures.} By shining a squeezed vacuum state on the input port of a microwave resonator containing the spins, we obtain a $1.2$\,dB noise reduction at the spectrometer output compared to the case of a vacuum input. This result constitutes a proof of principle of the application of quantum metrology to magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2017

Inductive-detection electron-spin resonance spectroscopy with $\mathbf{65}\,$spins$/\sqrt{\text{Hz}}$ sensitivity

We report electron spin resonance spectroscopy measurements performed at millikelvin temperatures in a custom-built spectrometer comprising a superconducting micro-resonator at $7$ GHz and a Josephson parametric amplifier. Owing to the small ${\sim}10^{-12}λ^3$ magnetic resonator mode volume and to the low noise of the parametric amplifier, the spectrometer sensitivity reaches $260\pm40$ spins$/$echo and $65\pm10$ $\mathrm{spins}/\sqrt{\text{Hz}}$, respectively.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2015

Controlling spin relaxation with a cavity

Spontaneous emission of radiation is one of the fundamental mechanisms by which an excited quantum system returns to equilibrium. For spins, however, spontaneous emission is generally negligible compared to other non-radiative relaxation processes because of the weak coupling between the magnetic dipole and the electromagnetic field. In 1946, Purcell realized that the spontaneous emission rate can be strongly enhanced by placing the quantum system in a resonant cavity -an effect which has since been used extensively to control the lifetime of atoms and semiconducting heterostructures coupled to microwave or optical cavities, underpinning single-photon sources. Here we report the first application of these ideas to spins in solids. By coupling donor spins in silicon to a superconducting microwave cavity of high quality factor and small mode volume, we reach for the first time the regime where spontaneous emission constitutes the dominant spin relaxation mechanism. The relaxation rate is increased by three orders of magnitude when the spins are tuned to the cavity resonance, showing that energy relaxation can be engineered and controlled on-demand. Our results provide a novel and general way to initialise spin systems into their ground state, with applications in magnetic resonance and quantum information processing. They also demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, the coupling between the magnetic dipole of a spin and the electromagnetic field can be enhanced up to the point where quantum fluctuations have a dramatic effect on the spin dynamics; as such our work represents an important step towards the coherent magnetic coupling of individual spins to microwave photons.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2015

Reaching the quantum limit of sensitivity in electron spin resonance

We report pulsed electron-spin resonance (ESR) measurements on an ensemble of Bismuth donors in Silicon cooled at 10mK in a dilution refrigerator. Using a Josephson parametric microwave amplifier combined with high-quality factor superconducting micro-resonators cooled at millikelvin temperatures, we improve the state-of-the-art sensitivity of inductive ESR detection by nearly 4 orders of magnitude. We demonstrate the detection of 1700 bismuth donor spins in silicon within a single Hahn echo with unit signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio, reduced to just 150 spins by averaging a single Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill sequence. This unprecedented sensitivity reaches the limit set by quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field instead of thermal or technical noise, which constitutes a novel regime for magnetic resonance.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2013

Nanoscale broadband transmission lines for spin qubit control

The intense interest in spin-based quantum information processing has caused an increasing overlap between two traditionally distinct disciplines, such as magnetic resonance and nanotechnology. In this work we discuss rigourous design guidelines to integrate microwave circuits with charge-sensitive nanostructures, and describe how to simulate such structures accurately and efficiently. We present a new design for an on-chip, broadband, nanoscale microwave line that optimizes the magnetic field driving a spin qubit, while minimizing the disturbance on a nearby charge sensor. This new structure was successfully employed in a single-spin qubit experiment, and shows that the simulations accurately predict the magnetic field values even at frequencies as high as 30 GHz.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗