Interface and electromagnetic effects in the valley splitting of Si quantum dots

Abstract The performance and scalability of silicon spin qubits depend directly on the value of the conduction band valley splitting (VS). In this work, we investigate the influence of electromagnetic fields and the interface width on the VS of a quantum dot in a Si/SiGe heterostructure. We propose a new three-dimensional theoretical model within the effective mass theory for the calculation of the VS in such heterostructures that takes into account the concentration fluctuation at the interfaces and the lateral confinement. With this model, we predict that the electric field is an important parameter for VS engineering, since it can shift the probability distribution away from small VSs for some interface widths. We also obtain a critical softness of the interfaces in the heterostructure, above which the best option for spin qubits is to consider an interface as wide as possible.