In a major step toward making a quantum computer using everyday materials, a team led by researchers at Princeton University has constructed a key piece of silicon hardware capable of controlling quantum behavior between two electrons with extremely high precision. The study was published Dec. 7 in the journal Science.

The researchers demonstrated the ability to control with precision the behavior of two silicon-based quantum bits, or qubits, paving the way for making complex, multi-qubit devices using technology that is less expensive and easier to manufacture than other approaches. Credit: David Zajac, Princeton University

The team constructed a gate that controls interactions between the electrons in a way that allows them to act as the quantum bits of information, or qubits, necessary for quantum computing. The demonstration of this nearly error-free, two-qubit gate is an important early step in building a more complex quantum computing device from silicon, the same material used in conventional computers and smartphones.

“We knew we needed to get this experiment to work if silicon-based technology was going to have a future in terms of scaling up and building a quantum computer,” said Jason Petta, a professor of physics at Princeton University. “The creation of this high-fidelity two-qubit gate opens the door to larger scale experiments.”

Silicon-based devices are likely to be less expensive and easier to manufacture than other technologies for achieving a quantum computer. Although other research groups and companies have announced quantum devices containing 50 or more qubits, those systems require exotic materials such as superconductors or charged atoms held in place by lasers.

Quantum computers can solve problems that are inaccessible with conventional computers. The devices may be able to factor extremely large numbers or find the optimal solutions for complex problems. They could also help researchers understand the physical properties of extremely small particles such as atoms and molecules, leading to advances in areas such as materials science and drug discovery.

Building a quantum computer requires researchers to create qubits and couple them to each other with high fidelity. Silicon-based quantum devices use a quantum property of electrons called “spin” to encode information. The spin can point either up or down in a manner analogous to the north and south poles of a magnet. In contrast, conventional computers work by manipulating the electron’s negative charge.

Achieving a high-performance, spin-based quantum device has been hampered by the fragility of spin states — they readily flip from up to down or vice versa unless they can be isolated in a very pure environment. By building the silicon quantum devices in Princeton’s Quantum Device Nanofabrication Laboratory, the researchers were able to keep the spins coherent — that is, in their quantum states — for relatively long periods of time.

To construct the two-qubit gate, the researchers layered tiny aluminum wires onto a highly ordered silicon crystal. The wires deliver voltages that trap two single electrons, separated by an energy barrier, in a well-like structure called a double quantum dot.

By temporarily lowering the energy barrier, the researchers allow the electrons to share quantum information, creating a special quantum state called entanglement. These trapped and entangled electrons are now ready for use as qubits, which are like conventional computer bits but with superpowers: while a conventional bit can represent a zero or a 1, each qubit can be simultaneously a zero and a 1, greatly expanding the number of possible permutations that can be compared instantaneously.

“The challenge is that it’s very difficult to build artificial structures small enough to trap and control single electrons without destroying their long storage times,” said David Zajac, a graduate student in physics at Princeton and first-author on the study. “This is the first demonstration of entanglement between two electron spins in silicon, a material known for providing one of the cleanest environments for electron spin states.”

The researchers demonstrated that they can use the first qubit to control the second qubit, signifying that the structure functioned as a controlled NOT (CNOT) gate, which is the quantum version of a commonly used computer circuit component. The researchers control the behavior of the first qubit by applying a magnetic field. The gate produces a result based on the state of the first qubit: If the first spin is pointed up, then the second qubit’s spin will flip, but if the first spin is down, the second one will not flip.

“The gate is basically saying it is only going to do something to one particle if the other particle is in a certain configuration,” Petta said. “What happens to one particle depends on the other particle.”

The researchers showed that they can maintain the electron spins in their quantum states with a fidelity exceeding 99 percent and that the gate works reliably to flip the spin of the second qubit about 75 percent of the time. The technology has the potential to scale to more qubits with even lower error rates, according to the researchers.

“This work stands out in a worldwide race to demonstrate the CNOT gate, a fundamental building block for quantum computation, in silicon-based qubits,” said HongWen Jiang, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California-Los Angeles. “The error rate for the two-qubit operation is unambiguously benchmarked. It is particularly impressive that this extraordinarily difficult experiment, which requires a sophisticated device fabrication and an exquisite control of quantum states, is done in a university lab consisting of only a few researchers.”

Power electronics, which do things like modify voltages or convert between direct and alternating current, are everywhere. They’re in the power bricks we use to charge our portable devices; they’re in the battery packs of electric cars; and they’re in the power grid itself, where they mediate between high-voltage transmission lines and the lower voltages of household electrical sockets.

Power conversion is intrinsically inefficient: A power converter will never output quite as much power as it takes in. But recently, power converters made from gallium nitride have begun to reach the market, boasting higher efficiencies and smaller sizes than conventional, silicon-based power converters.

Commercial gallium nitride power devices can’t handle voltages above about 600 volts, however, which limits their use to household electronics.

At the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ International Electron Devices Meeting this week, researchers from MIT, semiconductor company IQE, Columbia University, IBM, and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, presented a new design that, in tests, enabled gallium nitride power devices to handle voltages of 1,200 volts.

That’s already enough capacity for use in electric vehicles, but the researchers emphasize that their device is a first prototype manufactured in an academic lab. They believe that further work can boost its capacity to the 3,300-to-5,000-volt range, to bring the efficiencies of gallium nitride to the power electronics in the electrical grid itself.

That’s because the new device uses a fundamentally different design from existing gallium nitride power electronics.

“All the devices that are commercially available are what are called lateral devices,” says Tomás Palacios, who is an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, a member of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and senior author on the new paper. “So the entire device is fabricated on the top surface of the gallium nitride wafer, which is good for low-power applications like the laptop charger. But for medium- and high-power applications, vertical devices are much better. These are devices where the current, instead of flowing through the surface of the semiconductor, flows through the wafer, across the semiconductor. Vertical devices are much better in terms of how much voltage they can manage and how much current they control.”

For one thing, Palacios explains, current flows into one surface of a vertical device and out the other. That means that there’s simply more space in which to attach input and output wires, which enables higher current loads.

For another, Palacios says, “when you have lateral devices, all the current flows through a very narrow slab of material close to the surface. We are talking about a slab of material that could be just 50 nanometers in thickness. So all the current goes through there, and all the heat is being generated in that very narrow region, so it gets really, really, really hot. In a vertical device, the current flows through the entire wafer, so the heat dissipation is much more uniform.”

Narrowing the field

Although their advantages are well-known, vertical devices have been difficult to fabricate in gallium nitride. Power electronics depend on transistors, devices in which a charge applied to a “gate” switches a semiconductor material — such as silicon or gallium nitride — between a conductive and a nonconductive state.

For that switching to be efficient, the current flowing through the semiconductor needs to be confined to a relatively small area, where the gate’s electric field can exert an influence on it. In the past, researchers had attempted to build vertical transistors by embedding physical barriers in the gallium nitride to direct current into a channel beneath the gate.

But the barriers are built from a temperamental material that’s costly and difficult to produce, and integrating it with the surrounding gallium nitride in a way that doesn’t disrupt the transistor’s electronic properties has also proven challenging.

Palacios and his collaborators adopt a simple but effective alternative. The team includes first authors Yuhao Zhang, a postdoc in Palacios’s lab, and Min Sun, who received his MIT PhD in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) last spring; Daniel Piedra and Yuxuan Lin, MIT graduate students in EECS; Jie Hu, a postdoc in Palacios’s group; Zhihong Liu of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology; Xiang Gao of IQE; and Columbia’s Ken Shepard.

Rather than using an internal barrier to route current into a narrow region of a larger device, they simply use a narrower device. Their vertical gallium nitride transistors have bladelike protrusions on top, known as “fins.” On both sides of each fin are electrical contacts that together act as a gate. Current enters the transistor through another contact, on top of the fin, and exits through the bottom of the device. The narrowness of the fin ensures that the gate electrode will be able to switch the transistor on and off.

“Yuhao and Min’s brilliant idea, I think, was to say, ‘Instead of confining the current by having multiple materials in the same wafer, let’s confine it geometrically by removing the material from those regions where we don’t want the current to flow,'” Palacios says. “Instead of doing the complicated zigzag path for the current in conventional vertical transistors, let’s change the geometry of the transistor completely.”