Sound-driven single-electron transfer in a circuit of coupled quantum rails.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 31594936.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-019-12514-w and PMC identifier 6783466.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Surface acoustic waves (SAWs) strongly modulate the shallow electric potential in piezoelectric materials. In semiconductor heterostructures such as GaAs/AlGaAs, SAWs can thus be employed to transfer individual electrons between distant quantum dots. This transfer mechanism makes SAW technologies a promising candidate to convey quantum information through a circuit of quantum logic gates. Here we present two essential building blocks of such a SAW-driven quantum circuit. First, we implement a directional coupler allowing to partition a flying electron arbitrarily into two paths of transportation. Second, we demonstrate a triggered single-electron source enabling synchronisation of the SAW-driven sending process. Exceeding a single-shot transfer efficiency of 99%, we show that a SAW-driven integrated circuit is feasible with single electrons on a large scale. Our results pave the way to perform quantum logic operations with flying electron qubits.