Silicon transistors, the essential building block of most modern electronic devices, cannot shrink much further without being rendered inoperable by quantum mechanics. This classical-quantum threshold in fact presents a tremendous opportunity: if we harness quantum mechanics, rather than attempt to avoid it, we could build a quantum computer based upon quantum bits (qubits). Atomically identical donor spin qubits in silicon offer excellent native quantum properties, which match or outperform many qubit rivals. To scale up such systems into quantum computers it would be advantageous to connect silicon donor spin qubits in a ‘cavity-QED’ architecture, which has shown success in scaling up a number of other qubit systems. A few proposals in this direction introduce strong electric dipole interactions to the otherwise largely isolated spin qubit ground state in order to couple to superconducting cavities, however these strategies have discouraging coherence properties. Here I present an alternative approach, which uses the built-in strong electric dipole (optical) transitions of singly-ionized double donors in silicon. These donors, such as chalcogen donors S+, Se+, and Te+, have the same ground-state spin Hamiltonians as the extensively studied shallow donors, yet offer mid-gap binding energies and mid-IR optical access to excited orbital states. This photonic link is spin-selective which could be harnessed to measure and couple bulk-like donor qubits using photonic cavity-QED at 4.2K.
Watch a video of the talk here.