Highly tunable exchange in donor qubits in silicon

In this article we have investigated the electrical control of the exchange coupling (J) between donor-bound electrons in silicon with a detuning gate bias, crucial for the implementation of the two-qubit gate in a silicon quantum computer. We found that the asymmetric 2P-1P system provides a highly tunable exchange curve with mitigated J-oscillation, in which 5 orders of magnitude change in the exchange coupling can be achieved using a modest range of electric field (3 MV/m) for similar to 15-nm qubit separation. Compared with the barrier gate control of exchange in the Kane qubit, the detuning gate design reduces the gate density by a factor of similar to 2. By combining large-scale atomistic tight-binding method with a full configuration interaction technique, we captured the full two-electron spectrum of gated donors, providing state-of-the-art calculations of exchange energy in 1P-1P and 2P-1P qubits.