Coupling of three-spin qubits to their electric environment

Abstract

We investigate the behavior of qubits consisting of three electron spins in double and triple quantum dots subject to external electric fields. Our model includes two independent bias parameters, ɛ and ɛM, which both couple to external electromagnetic fields and can be controlled by gate voltages applied to the quantum dot structures. By varying these parameters, one can switch the qubit type by shifting the energies in the single quantum dots, thus changing the electron occupancy in each dot. Starting from the asymmetric resonant exchange qubit with a (2,0,1) and (1,0,2) charge admixture, one can smoothly cross over to the resonant exchange qubit with a detuned (1,1,1) charge configuration, and to the exchange-only qubit with the same charge configuration but equal energy levels down to the hybrid qubits with (1,2,0) and (0,2,1) charge configurations. Here, (l,m,n) describes a configuration with l electrons in the left dot, m electrons in the center dot, and n electrons in the right dot. We first focus on random electromagnetic field fluctuations, i.e., “charge noise,” at each quantum dot resulting in dephasing of the qubit, and we provide a complete map of the resulting dephasing time as a function of the bias parameters. We pay special attention to the so-called sweet spots and double sweet spots of the system, which are least susceptible to noise. In the second part, we investigate the coupling of the qubit system to the coherent quantized electromagnetic field in a superconducting strip-line cavity, and we also provide a complete map of the coupling strength as a function of the bias parameters. We analyze the asymmetric qubit-cavity coupling via ɛ and the symmetric coupling via ɛM.