Towards coupling a superconducting circuit with a single spin

Superconducting qubits are often considered as a leading potential candidate for the physical realization of a quantum computer. These qubits can be easily fabricated, manipulated and coupled together using simple linear electrical elements like capacitors, inductors and transmission lines. However, they suffer from rather poor coherence times due to their macroscopic size.

A promising research direction is to combine these qubits with spins in semiconductors and construct a hybrid quantum system. Indeed, spins may have extremely long coherence times and could therefore be a perfect system to reliably store the quantum information while superconducting qubits with their strong coupling with external fields are perfect systems to easily process fast quantum gates.

Efficient transfer of quantum information between these systems requires reaching the so-called “strong coupling regime” where the coupling between the different systems is much larger than their decoherence rates.  In this talk, I will present our progress and current experimental efforts in the quest for reaching the strong coupling regime between a superconducting circuit and a single spin [1-3]. 

1] M. Stern et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 123601 (2014).

[2] T. Douce et al., Phys. Rev. A, 92, 052335 (2015).

[3] A. Bienfait et al., Nature Nanotechnology, 282,1038 (2015).