Journal article
Valley interference and spin exchange at the atomic scale in silicon
B Voisin, J Bocquel, A Tankasala, M Usman, J Salfi, R Rahman, MY Simmons, LCL Hollenberg, S Rogge
Nature Communications | Nature Research | Published : 2020
Abstract
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. Here we directly image lattice-aperiodic valley interference between coupled atoms in silicon using scanning tunneling microscopy. Our atomistic analysis unveils the role of envelope anisotropy, valley interference and dopant placement on the Heisenberg spin exchange interaction. We find..
View full abstractRelated Projects (1)
Grants
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank J. Keizer for advice on sample fabrication, C. Hill, M.J. Calderon and S.N. Coppersmith for valuable discussions, and J.K. Gamble et al. for publishing a complete data set of tunnel coupling calculations35. We acknowledge support from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CE170100012), Silicon Quantum Computing Pty Ltd., and from the U.S. Army Research Office (W911NF-08-1-0527). J.S. acknowledges support from an ARC DECRA fellowship (DE160101490). The authors acknowledge the use of computational resources from NanoHUB, the Network for Computational Nanotechnology at Purdue University, and from the Australian Government through the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre under the National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme (NCMAS). This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) ECS150001, which is supported by National Science Foundation Grant No. ACI-154856270.