Protection of excited spin states by a superconducting energy gap

Abstract

The latest concepts for quantum computing and data storage envision to address and manipulate single spins. A limitation for single atoms or molecules in contact to a metal surface are the short lifetime of excited spin states, typically picoseconds, due to the exchange of energy and angular momentum with the itinerant electrons of the substrate [1-4]. Here we show that paramagnetic molecules on a superconducting substrate exhibit excited spin states with a lifetime of approximately 10 ns. We ascribe this increase in lifetime by orders of magnitude to the depletion of electronic states within the energy gap at the Fermi level. This prohibits pathways of energy relaxation into the substrate and allows for electrically pumping the magnetic molecule into higher spin states, making superconducting substrates premium candidates for spin manipulation. We further show that the proximity of the scanning tunneling microscope tip modifies the magnetic anisotropy.

References in corpus (2)

• Mechanical Control of Spin States in Spin-1 Molecules and the Underscreened Kondo Effect
• Magnetic Anisotropy and Magnetization Dynamics of Individual Atoms and Clusters of Fe and Co on Pt(111)

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• Transverse dynamical magnetic susceptibilities from regular static density functional theory: Evaluation of damping and g-shifts of spin-excitations
• Superconducting proximity effect and zero-bias anomaly in transport through quantum dots weakly attached to ferromagnetic leads
• Dynamical Negative Differential Resistance in Antiferromagnetically Coupled Few-Atom Spin-Chains
• Kondo physics in double quantum dot based Cooper pair splitters
• Theory of spin inelastic tunneling spectroscopy for superconductor-superconductor and superconductor-metal junctions
• Relaxation and decoherence of qubits encoded in collective states of engineered magnetic structures
• Spin Inelastic Electron Tunneling Spectroscopy on Local Magnetic Moment Embedded in Josephson Junction
• Optically and electrically controllable adatom spin-orbital dynamics in transition metal dichalcogenides