Harnessing the Quantum Behavior of Spins on Surfaces

Abstract

The desire to control and measure individual quantum systems such as atoms and ions in a vacuum has led to significant scientific and engineering developments in the past decades that form the basis of today's quantum information science. Single atoms and molecules on surfaces, on the other hand, are heavily investigated by physicists, chemists, and material scientists in search of novel electronic and magnetic functionalities. These two paths crossed in 2015 when it was first clearly demonstrated that individual spins on a surface can be coherently controlled and read out in an all-electrical fashion. The enabling technique is a combination of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and electron spin resonance (ESR), which offers unprecedented coherent controllability at the Angstrom length scale. This review aims to illustrate the essential ingredients that allow the quantum operations of single spins on surfaces. Three domains of applications of surface spins, namely quantum sensing, quantum control, and quantum simulation, are discussed with physical principles explained and examples presented. Enabled by the atomically-precise fabrication capability of STM, single spins on surfaces might one day lead to the realization of quantum nanodevices and artificial quantum materials at the atomic scale.

Advanced Materials, in press

References in corpus (25)

• Supplementary information for "Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor"
• Probing many-body dynamics on a 51-atom quantum simulator
• High-sensitivity diamond magnetometer with nanoscale resolution
• Single-shot read-out of an individual electron spin in a quantum dot
• Electrically driven single electron spin resonance in a slanting Zeeman field
• Scanning magnetic field microscope with a diamond single-spin sensor
• Quantum Communication through Spin Chain Dynamics: an Introductory Overview
• Tools for quantum simulation with ultracold atoms in optical lattices
• Reading and Writing Single-Atom Magnets
• Nanoscale magnetic imaging of a single electron spin under ambient conditions
• Controlling many-body dynamics with driven quantum scars in Rydberg atom arrays
• Chip-scale nanofabrication of single spins and spin arrays in diamond
• Skyrmion Qubits: A New Class of Quantum Logic Elements Based on Nanoscale Magnetization
• Exchange interaction between single magnetic adatoms
• Quantum-Coherent Nanoscience
• Engineering the eigenstates of coupled spin-1/2 atoms on a surface
• Tuning the exchange bias on a single atom from 1 mT to 10 T
• Spin Inelastic Electron Tunneling Spectroscopy on Local Spin Adsorbed on Surface
• Spin decoherence of magnetic atoms on surfaces
• Majorana Fermions in Magnetic Chains
• A cotunneling mechanism for all-electrical Electron Spin Resonance of single adsorbed atoms
• Longitudinal and transverse spin relaxation times of magnetic single adatoms: an ab initio analysis
• Role of coherence in transport through engineered atomic spin devices
• Decoherence of a singlet-triplet superposition state under dipolar interactions of an uncorrelated environment
• Relaxation and decoherence of qubits encoded in collective states of engineered magnetic structures