Scalable entanglement of nuclear spins mediated by electron exchange
Holly G. Stemp, Mark R. van Blankenstein, Serwan Asaad, Mateusz T. Mądzik, Benjamin Joecker, Hannes R. Firgau, Arne Laucht, Fay E. Hudson, Andrew S. Dzurak, Kohei M. Itoh, Alexander M. Jakob, Brett C. Johnson, David N. Jamieson, Andrea Morello
Published: 2025/3/10
Abstract
The use of nuclear spins for quantum computation is limited by the difficulty in creating genuine quantum entanglement between distant nuclei. Current demonstrations of nuclear entanglement in semiconductors rely upon coupling the nuclei to a common electron, which is not a scalable strategy. Here we demonstrate a two-qubit Control-Z logic operation between the nuclei of two phosphorus atoms in a silicon device, separated by up to 20 nanometers. Each atoms binds separate electrons, whose exchange interaction mediates the nuclear two-qubit gate. We prepare and measure a nuclear Bell state with a fidelity of 76 +/- 5 $\%$ and a concurrence of 0.67 +/- 0.05. With this method, future progress in scaling up semiconductor spin qubits can be extended to the development of nuclear-spin based quantum computers.