High-fidelity readout and control of a nuclear spin qubit in silicon

Abstract

Detection of nuclear spin precession is critical for a wide range of scientific techniques that have applications in diverse fields including analytical chemistry, materials science, medicine and biology. Fundamentally, it is possible because of the extreme isolation of nuclear spins from their environment. This isolation also makes single nuclear spins desirable for quantum-information processing, as shown by pioneering studies on nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond. The nuclear spin of a 31 P donor in silicon is very promising as a quantum bit: bulk measurements indicate that it has excellent coherence times and silicon is the dominant material in the microelectronics industry. Here we dem..