Effect of disorder and strain on the operation of planar Ge hole spin qubits

Abstract

Germanium quantum dots in strained $\text{Ge}/\text{Si}_{1-x}\text{Ge}_{x}$ heterostructures exhibit fast and coherent hole qubit control in experiments. In this work, we theoretically and numerically address the effects of random alloy disorder and gate-induced strain on the operation of planar Ge hole spin qubits. Electrical operation of hole quantum dot spin qubits is enabled by the strong Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC) originating from the intrinsic SOC in the Ge valence band as well as from the structural inversion asymmetry inherent in the underlying 2D hole gas. We use the atomistic valence force field (VFF) method to compute the strain due to random alloy disorder, and thermal expansion models in COMSOL Multiphysics to obtain the strain from a realistic gate-stack of planar hole quantum dot confinement. Recently, spin-orbit coupling terms $\propto k$ have been shown to be induced by strain inhomogeneity. Our hybrid approach to realistic device modeling suggests that strain inhomogeneity due to both random alloy disorder and gate-induced strain make a strong contribution to the linear-$k$ Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling, which eventually dominates hole spin EDSR; and there exist specific in-plane orientations of the global magnetic field $\mathbf{B}$ and the microwave drive $\mathbf{\tilde{E}}_{\text{ac}}$ for maximum EDSR Rabi frequency of the hole spin qubit. The current model including strain inhomogeneity accurately predicts the EDSR Rabi frequency to be $\!\sim\!100$ MHz for typical electric and magnetic fields in experiments, which represents at least an order of magnitude improvement in accuracy over phenomenological models assuming uniform uniaxial strain. State-of-the-art atomistic tight binding calculations via nano-electronic modeling (NEMO3D) are in agreement with the $\mathbf{k}{\cdot}\mathbf{p}$ description.