The effect of surface conductance on lateral gated quantum devices in Si/SiGe heterostructures

Quantum dots in Si/SiGe heterostructures are expected to have relatively long electron spin decoherence times, because of the low density of nuclear spins and the weak coupling between nuclear and electron spins. We provide experimental evidence suggesting that electron motion in a conductive layer...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lin, Xi, Hu, Jingshi, Lai, Andrew Pan, Zhang, Zhenning, MacLean, Kenneth, Dillard, Colin R., Xie, Ya-Hong, Kastner, Marc
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Institute of Physics (AIP) 2012
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/71015
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7641-5438
Description
Summary:Quantum dots in Si/SiGe heterostructures are expected to have relatively long electron spin decoherence times, because of the low density of nuclear spins and the weak coupling between nuclear and electron spins. We provide experimental evidence suggesting that electron motion in a conductive layer parallel to the two-dimensional electron gas, possibly resulting from the donors used to dope the Si quantum well, is responsible for the well-known difficulty in achieving well-controlled dots in this system. Charge motion in the conductive layer can cause depletion on large length scales, making electron confinement in the dot impossible, and can give rise to noise that can overwhelm the single-electron charging signal. Results of capacitance versus gate bias measurements to characterize this conductive layer are presented.