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The article focuses on the study which examines the significance of capacitance-based scanning probe spectroscopy to the dopant atoms in a semiconductor. The study showed that the technique probes successive charging states of the donor molecules determined the correct quantum description of the coupling of isolated donors and the platform of testing the atoms and molecules in a solid state. Dopants are the impurities deliberately added in low concentrations of semiconductor devices.

An atomistic method of calculating the spin-lattice relaxation times (T1) is presented for donors in silicon nanostructures comprising of millions of atoms. The method takes into account the full band structure of silicon including the spin-orbit interaction. The electron-phonon Hamiltonian, and hence, the deformation potential, is directly evaluated from the strain-dependent tight-binding Hamiltonian. The technique is applied to single donors and donor clusters in silicon, and explains the variation of Ty with the number of donors and electrons, as well as donor locations. Without any adjustable parameters, the relaxation rates in a magnetic field for both systems are found to vary as B5, in excellent quantitative agreement with experimental measurements. The results also show that by engineering electronic wave functions in nanostructures, T1 times can be varied by orders of magnitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of scanning tunneling microscope (STM) lithography and low temperature molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) opens the possibility of creating scalable donor based quantum computing architectures. In particular, atomically precise Si:P monolayer structures (δ-doped layers) serve as crucial contact regions and in-plane gates in single impurity devices. In this paper we study highly confined 8-doped layers to explain the disorder in the P dopant placements in realistically extended systems. The band structure is computed using the tight-binding formalism and charge-potential self-consistency. The exchange-correlation corrected impurity potential pulls down subbands below the silicon valley minima to create impurity bands. Our methodology is benchmarked and validated against other theoretical methods for small ordered systems. The doping density is shown to linearly control the impurity bands. Disorder within the Si:P δ-doped layer is examined using an extended domain to describe the effects of experimentally unavoidable randomness through explicitly disordered dopant placement. Disorder in the δ-doped layer breaks the symmetry in the supercell and creates band splitting in every subband. Vertical segregation of dopants is shown to dramatically reduce valley splitting (VS). Such VS can be used as a measure of ideality of the fabricated Si:P δ-doped layer. Although the resulting disorder induces density of states fluctuations, this theoretical analysis shows that δ-doped layers can serve as quasimetallic 2D electron sources even in the presence of strong nonidealities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exceptionally long quantum coherence times of phosphorus donor nuclear spin qubits in silicon, coupled with the proven scalability of silicon-based nano-electronics, make them attractive candidates for large-scale quantum computing. However, the high threshold of topological quantum error correction can only be captured in a two-dimensional array of qubits operating synchronously and in parallel-posing formidable fabrication and control challenges. We present an architecture that addresses these problems through a novel shared-control paradigm that is particularly suited to the natural uniformity of the phosphorus donor nuclear spin qubit states and electronic confinement. The architecture comprises a two-dimensional lattice of donor qubits sandwiched between two vertically separated control layers forming a mutually perpendicular crisscross gate array. Shared-control lines facilitate loading/unloading of single electrons to specific donors, thereby activating multiple qubits in parallel across the array on which the required operations for surface code quantum error correction are carried out by global spin control. The complexities of independent qubit control, wave function engineering, and ad hoc quantum interconnects are explicitly avoided. With many of the basic elements of fabrication and control based on demonstrated techniques and with simulated quantum operation below the surface code error threshold, the architecture represents a new pathway for large-scale quantum information processing in silicon and potentially in other qubit systems where uniformity can be exploited.