Proposed Five-Electron Charge Quadrupole Qubit

A charge qubit couples to environmental electric field fluctuations through its dipole moment, resulting in fast decoherence. We propose the p orbital (pO) qubit, formed by the single electron, p-like valence states of a five-electron silicon quantum dot, which couples to charge noise through the quadrupole moment. We demonstrate that the pO qubit offers distinct advantages in quality factor, gate speed, readout and size. We use a phenomenological, dipole two-level-fluctuator charge noise model to estimate a T₂^*∽80 ns. In conjunction with Rabi frequencies of order 10 GHz, an order of magnitude improvement in qubit quality factor is expected relative to state-of-the-art semiconductor spin qubits. The pO qubit features all-electrical control by modulating the dot's eccentricity. We also show how to perform two-qubit gates via the 1/r⁵ quadrupole-quadrupole interaction. We find a universal gate set using gradient ascent based control pulse optimization, subject to 10 GHz maximum allowable bandwidth and 1 ns pulse times.