Dimitrije Stepanenko

Spin-Electric Coupling in Molecular Magnets

We study the triangular antiferromagnet Cu3 in external electric fields, using symmetry group arguments and a Hubbard model approach. We identify a spin-electric coupling caused by an interplay between spin exchange, spin-orbit interaction, and the chirality of the underlying spin texture of the molecular magnet. This coupling allows for the electric control of the spin (qubit) states, e.g., by using an STM tip or a microwave cavity. We propose an experimental test for identifying molecular magnets exhibiting spin-electric effects.

Anisotropic spin exchange in pulsed quantum gates.

We show how to eliminate the first-order effects of the spin-orbit interaction in the performance of a two-qubit quantum gate. Our procedure involves tailoring the time dependence of the coupling between neighboring spins. We derive an effective Hamiltonian which permits a systematic analysis of this tailoring. Time-symmetric pulsing of the coupling automatically eliminates several undesirable terms in this Hamiltonian. Well chosen pulse shapes can produce an effectively isotropic exchange gate, which can be used in universal quantum computation with appropriate coding.

Universal Quantum Computation through Control of Spin-Orbit Coupling

We propose a method for quantum computation which uses control of spin-orbit coupling in a linear array of single electron quantum dots. Quantum gates are carried out by pulsing the exchange interaction between neighboring electron spins, including the anisotropic corrections due to spin-orbit coupling. Control over these corrections, even if limited, is sufficient for universal quantum computation over qubits encoded into pairs of electron spins. The number of voltage pulses required to carry out either single-qubit rotations or controlled-Not gates scales as the inverse of a dimensionless measure of the degree of control of spin-orbit coupling.

Spin electric effects in molecular antiferromagnets

Molecular nanomagnets show clear signatures of coherent behavior and have a wide variety of effective low-energy spin Hamiltonians suitable for encoding qubits and implementing spin-based quantum information processing. At the nanoscale, the preferred mechanism for the control of a quantum systems is the application of electric fields, which are strong, can be locally applied, and rapidly switched. In this work, we provide the theoretical tools for identifying molecular nanomagnets suitable for electric control. By group-theoretical symmetry analysis we find that the spin-electric coupling in triangular molecules is governed by the modification of the exchange interaction and is possible even in the absence of spin-orbit coupling. In pentagonal molecules the spin-electric coupling can exist only in the presence of spin-orbit interaction. This kind of coupling is allowed for both

Quantum gates between capacitively coupled double quantum dot two-spin qubits

s=1∕2

Singlet-triplet splitting in double quantum dots due to spin-orbit and hyperfine interactions

and

Hyperfine-induced decoherence in triangular spin-cluster qubits

s=3∕2

Exchange-based CNOT gates for singlet-triplet qubits with spin orbit interaction.

spins at the magnetic centers. Within the Hubbard model, we find a relation between the spin-electric coupling and the properties of the chemical bonds in a molecule, suggesting that the best candidates for strong spin-electric coupling are molecules with nearly degenerate bond orbitals. We also investigate the possible experimental signatures of spin-electric coupling in nuclear magnetic resonance and electron spin resonance spectroscopy, as well as in the thermodynamic measurements of magnetization, electric polarization, and specific heat of the molecules.

Coherent manipulation of single electron spins with Landau-Zener sweeps

We study the two-qubit controlled-NOT gate operating on qubits encoded in the spin state of a pair of electrons in a double quantum dot. We assume that the electrons can tunnel between the two quantum dots encoding a single qubit, while tunneling between the quantum dots that belong to different qubits is forbidden. Therefore, the two qubits interact exclusively through the direct Coulomb repulsion of the electrons. We find that entangling two-qubit gates can be performed by the electrical biasing of quantum dots and/or tuning of the tunneling matrix elements between the quantum dots within the qubits. The entangling interaction can be controlled by tuning the bias through the resonance between the singly occupied and doubly occupied singlet ground states of a double quantum dot.

Interference of heavy holes in an Aharonov-Bohm ring

We analyze the low-energy spectrum of a two-electron double quantum dot under a potential bias in the presence of an external magnetic field. We focus on the regime of spin blockade, taking into account the spin-orbit interaction and hyperfine coupling of electron and nuclear spins. Starting from a model for two interacting electrons in a double dot, we derive an effective two-level Hamiltonian in the vicinity of an avoided crossing between singlet and triplet levels, which are coupled by the spin-orbit and hyperfine interactions. We evaluate the level splitting at the anticrossing, and show that it depends on a variety of parameters including the spin-orbit coupling strength, the orientation of the external magnetic field relative to an internal spin-orbit axis, the potential detuning of the dots, and the difference between hyperfine fields in the two dots. We provide a formula for the splitting in terms of the spin-orbit length, the hyperfine fields in the two dots, and the double dot parameters such as tunnel coupling and Coulomb energy. This formula should prove useful for extracting spin-orbit parameters from transport or charge sensing experiments in such systems. We identify a parameter regime where the spin-orbit and hyperfine terms can become of comparable strength, and discuss how this regime might be reached.