Solid-state quantum computation—a new direction for nanotechnology

We review current proposals for six types of solid-state quantum computers. We discuss the general requirements for solid-state quantum computers and describe proposals which employ superconducting junctions, electron orbitals in quantum dots, electron spin resonance, nuclear spins of impurity atoms, and nuclear spins in a crystal lattice. We also describe our proposed nuclear spin quantum computer based on magnetic resonance force microscopy. Finally, we describe our numerical method for modeling quantum transformations with a large number (up to 1000) of qubits.     

Nuclear spin dynamics in the quantum regime of a single-molecule magnet

We show that the nuclear spin dynamics in the single-molecule magnet Mn12-ac below 1 K is governed by quantum tunneling fluctuations of the cluster spins, combined with intercluster nuclear spin diffusion. We also obtain the first experimental proof that-surprisingly-even deep in the quantum regime the nuclear spins remain in good thermal contact with the lattice phonons. We propose a simple model for how T-independent tunneling fluctuations can relax the nuclear polarization to the lattice that may serve as a framework for more sophisticated theories.     

Semi-Classical Dynamics in Quantum Spin Systems

We consider two limiting regimes, the large-spin and the mean-field limit, for the dynamical evolution of quantum spin systems. We prove that, in these limits, the time evolution of a class of quantum spin systems is determined by a corresponding Hamiltonian dynamics of classical spins. This result can be viewed as a Egorov-type theorem. We extend our results to the thermodynamic limit of lattice spin systems and continuum domains of infinite size, and we study the time evolution of coherent spin states in these limiting regimes.     

Topological spin liquid on the hyperkagome lattice of Na4Ir3O8

Recent experiments on the "hyperkagome" lattice system Na4Ir3O8 have demonstrated that it is a rare example of a three-dimensional spin-1/2 frustrated antiferromagnet. We investigate the role of quantum fluctuations as the primary mechanism lifting the macroscopic degeneracy inherited by classical spins on this lattice. In the semiclassical limit we predict, based on large-N calculations, that an unusual q[over -->]=0 coplanar magnetically ordered ground state is stabilized with no local zero modes that correspond to local deformations of the spin configurations. This phase melts in the quantum limit and a gapped topological Z2 spin liquid phase emerges. In the vicinity of this quantum phase transition, we study the dynamic spin structure factor and comment on the relevance of our results for future neutron scattering experiments.     

Voltage-selective bidirectional polarization and coherent rotation of nuclear spins in quantum dots

We propose and demonstrate that the nuclear spins of the host lattice in GaAs double quantum dots can be polarized in either of two opposite directions, parallel or antiparallel to an external magnetic field. The direction is selected by adjusting the dc voltage. This nuclear polarization manifests itself by repeated controlled electron-nuclear spin scattering in the Pauli spin-blockade state. Polarized nuclei are also controlled by means of nuclear magnetic resonance. This Letter confirms that the nuclear spins in quantum dots are long-lived quantum states with a coherence time of up to 1 ms, and may be a promising resource for quantum-information processing such as quantum memories for electron spin qubits.     

Macroscopic magnetization jumps due to independent magnons in frustrated quantum spin lattices

For a class of frustrated spin lattices including the Kagomé lattice we construct exact eigenstates consisting of several independent, localized one-magnon states and argue that they are ground states for high magnetic fields. If the maximal number of local magnons scales with the number of spins in the system, which is the case for the Kagomé lattice, the effect persists in the thermodynamic limit and gives rise to a macroscopic jump in the zero-temperature magnetization curve just below the saturation field. The effect decreases with increasing spin quantum number and vanishes in the classical limit. Thus it is a true macroscopic quantum effect.     

Quantum computation using the 13C nuclear spins near the single NV defect center in diamond

We discuss the possibility of realizing quantum computation on the basis of a cluster of single interacting nuclear spins in solids. This idea seems to be feasible because of the combination of two techniques—Single Molecule Spectroscopy and Optically Detected Electron Nuclear Double Resonance. Compared to the well-known bulk Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), the proposed method of quantum computation has the advantage that quantum computation is performed with pure spin states and the quantum processor is more easily scalable. At the same time, the advantages of NMR quantum computation are kept: long coherence time and easy construction of quantum gates. As a specific system to implement the above idea, we discuss the ¹³C-nuclear spins in the nearest vicinity of a single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) defect center in diamond, which can be optically detected using the technique of scanning confocal microscopy. Owing to the hyperfine coupling of the ground state electron paramagnetic spin S=1 of the center to ¹³C nuclear spins in a diamond lattice, the states of nuclear spins in the vicinity of the defect-center can be addressed individually. Preliminary consideration shows that it should be possible to address up to 12 individual ¹³C nuclear spins. The dephasing time of the nuclear spin states at low temperatures allows realization up to 10⁵ gates.     

The microstructure of amorphous Co−P and Ni−P investigated with TEM and SAXS

The lowest order quantum corrections to the energy of a static soliton, of an easy plane spin chain, are calculated. The discreteness of the lattice of spins is shown to significantly effect the quantum corrections. However, if one uses a similar approximation to treat the spin wave dispersion relation, then the parameters which one extracts from the experimentally determined dispersion are such that the magnitude of the quantum corrections calculated in the continuum approximation are essentially exact.     

Optical pumping of quantum-dot nuclear spins

Hyperfine interactions with randomly oriented nuclear spins present a fundamental decoherence mechanism for electron spin in a quantum dot, that can be suppressed by polarizing the nuclear spins. Here, we analyze an all-optical scheme that uses hyperfine interactions to implement laser cooling of quantum-dot nuclear spins. The limitation imposed on spin cooling by the dark states for collective spin relaxation can be overcome by modulating the electron wave function.     

Quantum coherence and correlation dynamics of two-qubit system in spin bath environment

The quantum entanglement,discord,and coherence dynamics of two spins in the model of a spin coupled to a spin bath through an intermediate spin are studied.The effects of the important physical parameters including the coupling strength of two spins,the interaction strength between the intermediate spin and the spin bath,the number of bath spins and the temperature of the system on quantum coherence and correlation dynamics are discussed in different cases.The frozen quantum discord can be observed whereas coherence does not when the initial state is the Bell-diagonal state.At finite temperature,we find that coherence is more robust than quantum discord,which is better than entanglement,in terms of resisting the influence of environment.Therefore,quantum coherence is more tenacious than quantum correlation as an important resource.     

Reading entanglement in terms of spin configurations in quantum magnets

We consider a quantum many-body system made of N interacting S=1/2 spins on a lattice, and develop a formalism which allows to extract, out of conventional magnetic observables, the quantum probabilities for any selected spin pair to be in maximally entangled or factorized two-spin states. This result is used in order to capture the meaning of entanglement properties in terms of magnetic behavior. In particular, we consider the concurrence between two spins and show how its expression extracts information on the presence of bipartite entanglement out of the probability distributions relative to specific sets of two-spin quantum states. We apply the above findings to the antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model in a uniform magnetic field, both on a chain and on a two-leg ladder. Using Quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we obtain the above probability distributions and the associated entanglement, discussing their evolution under application of the field.     

Ground state of the kagomé-like S=1/2 antiferromagnet volborthite Cu3V2O7(OH)2 x 2H2O

The volborthite compound is one of the very few realizations of S=1/2 quantum spins on a highly frustrated kagomé-like lattice. Low-T SQUID measurements reveal a broad magnetic transition below 2 K which is further confirmed by a peak in the 51V nuclear spin relaxation rate (1/T1) at 1.4 K +/- 0.2 K. Through 51V NMR, the ground state (GS) appears to be a mixture of different spin configurations, among which 20% corresponds to a well defined short-range order, possibly of the sqrt(3) x sqrt(3) type. While the freezing involves all the Cu2+ spins, only 40% of the copper moment is actually frozen which suggests that quantum fluctuations strongly renormalize the GS.     

Optical nuclear spin polarization in quantum dots

Hyperfine interaction between electron spin and randomly oriented nuclear spins is a key issue of electron coherence for quantum information/computation. We propose an efficient way to establish high polarization of nuclear spins and reduce the intrinsic nuclear spin fluctuations. Here, we polarize the nuclear spins in semiconductor quantum dot(QD) by the coherent population trapping(CPT) and the electric dipole spin resonance(EDSR) induced by optical fields and ac electric fields. By tuning the optical fields, we can obtain a powerful cooling background based on CPT for nuclear spin polarization. The EDSR can enhance the spin flip–flop rate which may increase the cooling efficiency. With the help of CPT and EDSR, an enhancement of 1300 times of the electron coherence time can be obtained after a 10-ns preparation time.     

Measurement of a heavy-hole hyperfine interaction in InGaAs quantum dots using resonance fluorescence

We measure the strength and the sign of hyperfine interaction of a heavy hole with nuclear spins in single self-assembled quantum dots. Our experiments utilize the locking of a quantum dot resonance to an incident laser frequency to generate nuclear spin polarization. By monitoring the resulting Overhauser shift of optical transitions that are split either by electron or exciton Zeeman energy with respect to the locked transition using resonance fluorescence, we find that the ratio of the heavy-hole and electron hyperfine interactions is -0.09 ± 0.02 in three quantum dots. Since hyperfine interactions constitute the principal decoherence source for spin qubits, we expect our results to be important for efforts aimed at using heavy-hole spins in quantum information processing.     

The Dynamical Evolution of Quantum Correlations in the Two Isolate Spin Particles Coupled to a Common Bath

We study the dynamical evolution of quantum correlations between two central spins independently coupled to a common bath, which are represented by quantum entanglement and quantum discord. According to the results of the exact solution, we show that quantum discord is more robust and includes richer correlation than quantum entanglement due to the nonvanishing quantum correlation in the region of entanglement death, i.e., the separable states maybe contain nonclassical correlations. We discuss the effects of the intrinsic properties of the bath on quantum correlation between the two central spins in the XY and XXZ model baths. At the low temperature, the central system can keep the good quantum correlation. With the more spin number in the bath, the dynamical evolution of quantum correlation can be bounded with the small oscillation and finally approaches a stable value. In addition, we find that the interaction between the central spins and the bath in the z direction has the significant effects on quantum correlation of the central spin system.     

Entanglement versus correlations in spin systems

We consider pure quantum states of N>1 spins or qubits and study the average entanglement that can be localized between two separated spins by performing local measurements on the other individual spins. We show that all classical correlation functions provide lower bounds to this localizable entanglement, which follows from the observation that classical correlations can always be increased by doing appropriate local measurements on the other qubits. We analyze the localizable entanglement in familiar spin systems and illustrate the results on the hand of the Ising spin model, in which we observe characteristic features for a quantum phase transition such as a diverging entanglement length.     

Quantum and Classical Correlations in the Solid-State NMR Free Induction Decay

The free induction decay (FID) of the transverse magnetization in a dipolar-coupled rigid lattice is a fundamental problem in magnetic resonance and in the theory of many-body systems. As it was shown earlier the FID shapes for the systems of classical magnetic moments and for quantum nuclear spin ones coincide if there are many nearly equivalent nearest neighbors n in a solid lattice. In this paper, we reduce a multispin density matrix of above system to a two-spin matrix. Then we obtain analytic expressions for the mutual information and the quantum and classical parts of correlations at the arbitrary spin quantum number S, in the high-temperature approximation. The time dependence of these functions is expressed via the derivative of the FID shape. To extract classical correlations for S > 1/2 we provide generalized POVM measurement (positive-operator-valued measure) using the basis of spin coherent states. We show that in every pair of spins the portion of quantum correlations changes from 1/2 to 1/(S + 1) when S is growing up, and quantum properties disappear completely only if S → ∞.     

Magnetic interaction between coupled quantum dots

We study the magnetic coupling in artificial molecules composed of two and four laterally coupled quantum dots. The electronic ground-state configurations of such systems are determined by applying current spin density functional theory which allows to include effects of magnetic fields. While the ground-state of a two-dot molecule with strong enough inter-dot coupling tends to be antiferromagnetic with respect to the spins of the single dot components, we find that a square lattice of four dots has a ferromagnetic ground state. Received 17 February 1999 and Received in final form 1 June 1999     

Implementation of spin Hamiltonians in optical lattices

We propose an optical lattice setup to investigate spin chains and ladders. Electric and magnetic fields allow us to vary at will the coupling constants, producing a variety of quantum phases including the Haldane phase, critical phases, quantum dimers, etc. Numerical simulations are presented showing how ground states can be prepared adiabatically. We also propose ways to measure a number of observables, like energy gap, staggered magnetization, end-chain spins effects, spin correlations, and the string-order parameter.     

Delay of Spatial Quantum Correlations in Magnetic Nanostructures

Simultaneous quantum correlations between two spins in magnetic nanostructures are considered in the model of a linear chain of a finite number of atoms with exchange interaction between electron spins of neighboring atoms in the framework of the Heisenberg ferromagnetism theory. We assume that in the initial state, the spins of all chain atoms except the first two are oriented along the same direction. The spins of the first two atoms are flipped. Due to the exchange interaction, this initial state generates a spin flip wave along the chain. The expressions obtained for nonstationary quantum amplitudes of the flip probability waves for an even number of spins can be used for calculating quantum correlations between two spins separated by a large distance in a chain. Numerical calculations of the spin correlator reveal that the correlation between two spins in the chain occurs with a delay on the order of the time of propagation of the exchange interaction along the spin chain. After the delay, the spin correlation amplitude abruptly increases followed by subsequent oscillatory temporal behavior.