Valley interference and spin exchange at the atomic scale in silicon

Direct measurement of coupled donors in silicon.
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Tunneling is a fundamental quantum process with no classical equivalent, which can compete with Coulomb interactions to give rise to complex phenomena. Phosphorus dopants in silicon can be placed with atomic precision to address the different regimes arising from this competition. However, they exploit wavefunctions relying on crystal band symmetries, which tunneling interactions are inherently sensitive to.

Researchers at University of New South Wales, Australia, have directly imaged lattice-aperiodic valley interference between coupled atoms in silicon using scanning tunneling microscopy. Their atomistic analysis unveils the role of envelope anisotropy, valley interference and dopant placement on the Heisenberg spin exchange interaction.

They found that the exchange can become immune to valley interference by engineering in-plane dopant placement along specific crystallographic directions. A vacuum-like behaviour is recovered, where the exchange is maximised to the overlap between the donor orbitals, and pair-to-pair variations limited to a factor of less than 10 considering the accuracy in dopant positioning.

This robustness remains over a large range of distances, from the strongly Coulomb interacting regime relevant for high-fidelity quantum computation to strongly coupled donor arrays of interest for quantum simulation in silicon.

The paper has been published in Nature Communications.

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