Lower bound for electron spin entanglement from beamsplitter current correlations

We determine a lower bound for the entanglement of pairs of electron spins injected into a mesoscopic conductor. The bound can be expressed in terms of experimentally accessible quantities, the zero-frequency current correlators (shot noise power or cross-correlators) after transmission through an electronic beam splitter. The effect of spin relaxation (T_1 processes) and decoherence (T_2 processes) during the ballistic coherent transmission of the carriers in the wires is taken into account within Bloch theory. The presence of a variable inhomogeneous magnetic field allows the determination of a useful lower bound for the entanglement of arbitrary entangled states. The decrease in entanglement due to thermally mixed states is studied. Both the entanglement of the output of a source (entangler) and the relaxation (T_1) and decoherence (T_2) times can be determined.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Nuclear State Preparation via Landau-Zener-Stueckelberg transitions in Double Quantum Dots

We theoretically model a nuclear-state preparation scheme that increases the coherence time of a two-spin qubit in a double quantum dot. The two-electron system is tuned repeatedly across a singlet-triplet level-anticrossing with alternating slow and rapid sweeps of an external bias voltage. Using a Landau-Zener-Stueckelberg model, we find that in addition to a small nuclear polarization that weakly affects the electron spin coherence, the slow sweeps are only partially adiabatic and lead to a weak nuclear spin measurement and a nuclear-state narrowing which prolongs the electron spin coherence. This resolves some open problems brought up by a recent experiment [D. J. Reilly et al., Science 321, 817 (2008).]. Based on our description of the weak measurement, we simulate a system with up to n=200 nuclear spins per dot. Scaling in n indicates a stronger effect for larger n.Comment: 4.1 pages, 2 figure

Bias-controllable intrinsic spin polarization in a quantum dot

We propose a novel scheme to efficiently polarize and manipulate the electron spin in a quantum dot. This scheme is based on the spin-orbit interaction and it possesses following advantages: (1) The direction and the strength of the spin polarization is well controllable and manipulatable by simply varying the bias or the gate voltage. (2) The spin polarization is quite large even with a weak spin-orbit interaction. (3) Both electron-electron interaction and multi-energy levels do not weaken but strengthen the spin polarization. (4) It has the short spin flip time. (5) The device is free of a magnetic field or a ferromagnetic material. (6) It can be easily realized with present technology.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Coherent Adiabatic Spin Control in the Presence of Charge Noise Using Tailored Pulses

We study finite-time Landau-Zener transitions at a singlet-triplet level crossing in a GaAs double quantum dot, both experimentally and theoretically. Sweeps across the anticrossing in the high driving speed limit result in oscillations with a small visibility. Here we demonstrate how to increase the oscillation visibility while keeping sweep times shorter than T2* using a tailored pulse with a detuning dependent level velocity. Our results show an improvement of a factor ~2.9 for the oscillation visibility. In particular, we were able to obtain a visibility of ~0.5 for St\"uckelberg oscillations, which demonstrates the creation of an equally weighted superposition of the qubit states.Comment: Related papers at http://pettagroup.princeton.ed

Double-Occupancy Errors, Adiabaticity, and Entanglement of Spin-Qubits in Quantum Dots

Quantum gates that temporarily increase singlet-triplet splitting in order to swap electronic spins in coupled quantum dots, lead inevitably to a finite double-occupancy probability for both dots. By solving the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation for a coupled dot model, we demonstrate that this does not necessarily lead to quantum computation errors. Instead, the coupled dot ground state evolves quasi-adiabatically for typical system parameters so that the double-occupancy probability at the completion of swapping is negligibly small. We introduce a measure of entanglement which explicitly takes into account the possibilty of double occupancies and provides a necessary and sufficient criterion for entangled states.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures include

Spin exchange interaction with tunable range between graphene quantum dots

We study the spin exchange between two electrons localized in separate quantum dots in graphene. The electronic states in the conduction band are coupled indirectly by tunneling to a common continuum of delocalized states in the valence band. As a model, we use a two-impurity Anderson Hamiltonian which we subsequently transform into an effective spin Hamiltonian by way of a two-stage Schrieffer-Wolff transformation. We then compare our result to that from a Coqblin-Schrieffer approach as well as to fourth order perturbation theory.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Electronic Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer for multi-mode entanglement detection

We show that multi-mode entanglement of electrons in a mesoscopic conductor can be detected by a measurement of the zero-frequency current correlations in an electronic Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer. By this mean, one can further establish a lower bound to the entanglement of formation of two-electron input states. Our results extend the work of Burkard and Loss [Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 087903 (2003)] to many channels and provide a way to test the existence of entangled states involving both orbital and spin degrees of freedom.Comment: 6 pages. Revised version. Ref. adde

Relaxation and Dephasing in a Flux-qubit

We report detailed measurements of the relaxation and dephasing time in a flux-qubit measured by a switching DC SQUID. We studied their dependence on the two important circuit bias parameters: the externally applied magnetic flux and the bias current through the SQUID in two samples. We demonstrate two complementary strategies to protect the qubit from these decoherence sources. One consists in biasing the qubit so that its resonance frequency is stationary with respect to the control parameters ({\it optimal point}) ; the second consists in {\it decoupling} the qubit from current noise by chosing a proper bias current through the SQUID. At the decoupled optimal point, we measured long spin-echo decay times of up to $4 \mu s$.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Letter

Dephasing of a superconducting qubit induced by photon noise

We have studied the dephasing of a superconducting flux-qubit coupled to a DC-SQUID based oscillator. By varying the bias conditions of both circuits we were able to tune their effective coupling strength. This allowed us to measure the effect of such a controllable and well-characterized environment on the qubit coherence. We can quantitatively account for our data with a simple model in which thermal fluctuations of the photon number in the oscillator are the limiting factor. In particular, we observe a strong reduction of the dephasing rate whenever the coupling is tuned to zero. At the optimal point we find a large spin-echo decay time of $4 \mu s$.Comment: New version of earlier paper arXiv/0507290 after in-depth rewritin