Full coherent control of nuclear spins in an optically pumped single quantum dot

Arxiv – Full coherent control of nuclear spins in an optically pumped single quantum dot The interaction between electron and nuclear spins in quantum dots is often seen as detrimental for the use of electron spin for quantum information processing. It is now shown, however, that such interaction can be used to coherently control the polarization of tens of thousands of nuclear spins, opening the way to experiments using nuclear rather than electron spin.

Highly polarized nuclear spins within a semiconductor quantum dot (QD) induce effective magnetic (Overhauser) fields of up to several Tesla acting on the electron spin, or up to a few hundred mT for the hole spin. Recently this has been recognized as a resource for intrinsic control of QD-based spin quantum bits. However, only static long-lived Overhauser fields could be used. Here we demonstrate fast redirection on the microsecond time-scale of Overhauser fields of the order of 0.5 T experienced by a single electron spin in an optically pumped GaAs quantum dot. This has been achieved using full coherent control of an ensemble of 1000 − ten thousand optically polarized nuclear spins by sequences of short radio-frequency (rf) pulses. These results open the way to a new class of experiments using rf techniques to achieve highly-correlated nuclear spins in quantum dots, such as adiabatic demagnetization in the rotating frame leading to sub-μK nuclear spin temperatures, rapid adiabatic passage, and spin squeezing

8 pages of supplemental material from Nature Materials

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