Phys.org June 3, 2021
An international team of researchers (Austria, Italy, Germany, Spain) has created a new candidate system for reliable qubits using the spin of holes which carry the quantum-mechanical property of spin and interact if they come close to each other. The hole can move around in the solid when a neighboring electron fills the hole. They confined the holes to the germanium-rich layer in the middle of layered silicon and germanium adding gates to control the movement of holes. They could move holes and alter their properties. By engineering different hole properties, they created the qubit out of the two interacting hole spins using a weak magnetic field. The weak magnetic field allows the combination of the qubit with superconductors, usually inhibited by strong magnetic fields. Superconductors support the linking of several qubits due to their quantum-mechanical nature. This could enable scientists to build new kinds of quantum computers combining semiconductors and superconductors. The hole spin qubits look promising because of their processing speed. With up to one hundred million operations per second as well as their long lifetime of up to 150 microseconds they seem particularly viable for quantum computing…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
