Pauli Spin Blockade of Heavy Holes in a Silicon Double Quantum Dot

Abstract

In this work, we study hole transport in a planar silicon metal-oxide-semiconductor based double quantum dot. We demonstrate Pauli spin blockade in the few hole regime and map the spin relaxation induced leakage current as a function of interdot level spacing and magnetic field. With varied interdot tunnel coupling, we can identify different dominant spin relaxation mechanisms. Application of a strong out-of-plane magnetic field causes an avoided singlet-triplet level crossing, from which the heavy hole g-factor ~0.93 and the strength of spin-orbit interaction ~110 μeV can be obtained. The demonstrated strong spin-orbit interaction of heavy holes promises fast local spin manipulation using only electric fields, which is of great interest for quantum information processing.