Even as today's most prominent spin-based qubit technologies are maturing in terms of capability and sophistication, there is growing interest in exploring alternate material platforms that may provide advantages, such as enhanced qubit control, longer coherence times, and improved extensibility. Recent advances in heterostructure material growth have opened new possibilities for employing hole spins in semiconductors for qubit applications. Undoped, strained Ge/SiGe quantum wells are promising candidate hosts for hole spin-based qubits due to their low disorder, large intrinsic spin-orbit coupling strength, and absence of valley states. Here, we use a simple one-layer gated device structure to demonstrate both a single quantum dot as well as coupling 2 between two adjacent quantum dots. The hole effective mass in these undoped structures, m* ~ 0.08 m0, is significantly lower than for electrons in Si/SiGe, pointing to the possibility of enhanced tunnel couplings in quantum dots and favorable qubit-qubit interactions in an industry-compatible semiconductor platform.
CONCLUSIONSWe have demonstrated lithographically defined single and double hole quantum dots in high quality strained Ge/SiGe quantum wells. These results strongly suggest that this material system may serve as a viable host for spin-based qubits (compatible with CMOS processing) and enable quantitative comparisons between quantum dots in electron and hole systems. Multi-metal-layer devices, as are commonly used in Si/SiGe, should be directly applicable to Ge/SiGe to increase the sharpness of tunnel barriers and provide more orthogonal control of coupling between adjacent quantum dots. Development of successful qubit architectures will ultimately call for indepth studies of qubit decoherence mechanisms in this system, in particular the impact of charge noise due to the enhanced spin-orbit coupling.
AUTHOR INFORMATION