Palladium gates for reproducible quantum dots in silicon

We replace the established aluminium gates for the formation of quantum dots in silicon with gates made from palladium. We study the morphology of both aluminium and palladium gates with transmission electron microscopy. The native aluminium oxide is found to be formed all around the aluminium gates, which could lead to the formation of unintentional dots. Therefore, we report on a novel fabrication route that replaces aluminium and its native oxide by palladium with atomic-layer-deposition-grown aluminium oxide. Using this approach, we show the formation of low-disorder gate-defined quantum dots, which are reproducibly fabricated. Furthermore, palladium enables us to further shrink the gate design, allowing us to perform electron transport measurements in the few-electron regime in devices comprising only two gate layers, a major technological advancement. It remains to be seen, whether the introduction of palladium gates can improve the excellent results on electron and nuclear spin qubits defined with an aluminium gate stack

Observation of the single-electron regime in a highly tunable silicon quantum dot

We report on low-temperature electronic transport measurements of a silicon metal-oxide-semiconductor quantum dot, with independent gate control of electron densities in the leads and the quantum dot island. This architecture allows the dot energy levels to be probed without affecting the electron density in the leads, and vice versa. Appropriate gate biasing enables the dot occupancy to be reduced to the single-electron level, as evidenced by magnetospectroscopy measurements of the ground state of the first two charge transitions. Independent gate control of the electron reservoirs also enables discrimination between excited states of the dot and density of states modulations in the leads.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, accepted for Applied Physics Letter

Anisotropic Pauli spin blockade in hole quantum dots

We present measurements on gate-defined double quantum dots in Ge-Si core-shell nanowires, which we tune to a regime with visible shell filling in both dots. We observe a Pauli spin blockade and can assign the measured leakage current at low magnetic fields to spin-flip cotunneling, for which we measure a strong anisotropy related to an anisotropic g-factor. At higher magnetic fields we see signatures for leakage current caused by spin-orbit coupling between (1,1)-singlet and (2,0)-triplet states. Taking into account these anisotropic spin-flip mechanisms, we can choose the magnetic field direction with the longest spin lifetime for improved spin-orbit qubits

Depletion-mode Quantum Dots in Intrinsic Silicon

We report the fabrication and electrical characterization of depletion-mode quantum dots in a two-dimensional hole gas (2DHG) in intrinsic silicon. We use fixed charge in a SiO$_2$/Al$_2$O$_3$ dielectric stack to induce a 2DHG at the Si/SiO$_2$ interface. Fabrication of the gate structures is accomplished with a single layer metallization process. Transport spectroscopy reveals regular Coulomb oscillations with charging energies of 10-15 meV and 3-5 meV for the few- and many-hole regimes, respectively. This depletion-mode design avoids complex multilayer architectures requiring precision alignment, and allows to adopt directly best practices already developed for depletion dots in other material systems. We also demonstrate a method to deactivate fixed charge in the SiO$_2$/Al$_2$O$_3$ dielectric stack using deep ultraviolet light, which may become an important procedure to avoid unwanted 2DHG build-up in Si MOS quantum bits.Comment: Accepted to Applied Physics Letters. 5 pages, 3 figure