The growing sophistication and shrinking size of silicon-based electronic have underpinned the revolutionary developments in information technology over the past decade. Nowadays, actual device performance is compromised by the emergence of quantum effects at the nanoscale. On the other hand, quantum information processing (QIP) provides a way to exploit these limitations and develop a new paradigm that will offer a new technological platform with greater computational power. The building block of QIP is the so-called quantum bit (qubit), which is generally made of a two level system such as an electron spin. A good qubit must be writeable and readable, interact with other qubits, and remain coherent long enough for error correcting protocols to be applied. Out of the large variety of approaches to building a quantum computer currently being pursued, those based in silicon are able to build upon the advanced methods used in silicon microelectronic industry, as well as the control over material purity. During the last decade architectures for spin-based QIP have been proposed such as the Kane’s one which consists in exploiting the nuclear spin of donor atoms implanted into silicon. Interest in donor-based spin-qubits in silicon has been motivated by their exceptionally long electron spin coherence times, exceeding one second in isotopically enriched 28Si. Additionally the donor electron spin can be a gateway to access the donor nuclear spin, which has longer coherence times, even at room temperature and the potential to serve as a quantum memory. Moreover, the single shot read-out of a single electron and nuclear spins, a milestone for donor-based quantum computing, has been recently demonstrated in nanoelectronic silicon devices.
We aim at studying spin-qubits in silicon that will be the basis of a building block for QIP with a great potential for scalability. For this reason, the devices will be designed to be compatible with CMOS industry process and will be fabricated in an industry-oriented cleanroom: the CEA-LETI. More specifically, the main goal is the study of donor spin Qbits in silicon. As a result, the main unit is composed of two elements: a donor atoms and a charge detector. The latter is used to measure the spin of the donor thanks to a conversion of quantum information from spin to charge degree of freedom.
