Nanoscale Advanced Materials Engineering for Quantum Technologies

The ability to engineer the electrical, optical and magnetic properties of advanced materials on the nanoscale is of increasing importance to the development of future quantum technologies. One approach to achieving this is through impurity doping, with increased control over the spatial resolution and isotopic purity enabled by the development of dedicated tools. To achieve this goal a new capability (the ‘Platform for Nanoscale Advanced Materials Engineering, 'P-NAME', Facility) has been developed and applied specifically to the engineering of materials for quantum technology. We demonstrate how the combined utilisation of novel ion source and mass selection technology enables the direct-write creation of bespoke materials utilising ultra-high ion doses (>1E19 ions/cm²) down to single-ion doping. The validation of such capability requires the utilisation of advanced detection and characterisation techniques. We draw upon the combined use of electrical, photonic, mass spectroscopy and electron microscopy methods in order to enable this. Together this allows us to demonstrate the delivery of ultra-enriched ²⁸Si as a platform for quantum technology device fabrication, and also for the doping of single-ion impurity centres within solid-state systems. Of particular interest is the development of methods to reliably detect single-ion doping events. This is a key enabling step to overcome the inherent limitation that is otherwise imposed by Possionian statistics. Progress within this area remains a key challenge if scaling to deliver qubit arrays of the order of 10⁶ is to be achieved in order to deliver full error corrected quantum computation.