Abstract
The spin-orbit interaction lies at the heart of quantum computation with spin qubits, research on topologically nontrivial states, and various applications in spintronics. Hole spins in Ge/Si core/shell nanowires experience a spin-orbit interaction that has been predicted to be both strong and electrically tunable, making them a particularly promising platform for research in these fields. We experimentally determine the strength of spin-orbit interaction of hole spins confined to a double quantum dot in a Ge/Si nanowire by measuring spin-mixing transitions inside a regime of spin-blockaded transport. We find a remarkably short spin-orbit length of , comparable to the quantum dot length and the interdot distance. We additionally observe a large orbital effect of the applied magnetic field on the hole states, resulting in a large magnetic field dependence of the spin-mixing transition energies. Strikingly, together with these orbital effects, the strong spin-orbit interaction causes a significant enhancement of the factor with magnetic field. The large spin-orbit interaction strength demonstrated is consistent with the predicted direct Rashba spin-orbit interaction in this material system and is expected to enable ultrafast Rabi oscillations of spin qubits and efficient qubit-qubit interactions, as well as provide a platform suitable for studying Majorana zero modes.
- Received 17 July 2020
- Revised 9 November 2020
- Accepted 24 December 2020
- Corrected 19 April 2021
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.013081
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
Published by the American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Corrections
19 April 2021
Correction: Reference [56] has been corrected to reflect that the Supplemental Material now includes raw data files and a plotting script used for the work.