Note: Since its discovery, graphene has been indicated as a promising platform for quantum technologies (QT). The number of theoretical proposal dedicated to this vision has grown steadily, exploring a wide range of directions, ranging from spin and valley qubits, to topologically-protected states. The experimental confirmation of these ideas lagged so far significantly behind, mostly because of material quality problems. The quality of graphene-based devices has however improved dramatically in the past five years, thanks to the advent of the so-called van der Waals (vdW) heteostructures - artificial solids formed by mechanically stacking layers of different two dimensional (2D) materials, such as graphene, hexagonal boron nitride and transition metal dichalcogenides. These new advances open now finally the door to put several of those theoretical proposals to test.
The goal of this project is to assess experimentally the potential of graphene-based heterostructures for QT applications. Specifically, I will push the development of an advanced technological platform for vdW heterostructures, which will allow to give quantitative answers to the following open questions: i) what are the relaxation and coherence times of spin and valley qubits in isotopically purified bilayer graphene (BLG); ii) what is the efficiency of a Cooper-pair splitter based on BLG; and iii) what are the characteristic energy scales of topologically protected quantum states engineered in graphene-based heterostructures.
At the end of this project, I aim at being in the position of saying whether graphene is the horse-worth-betting-on predicted by theory, or whether it still hides surprises in terms of fundamental physics. The technological advancements developed in this project for integrating nanostructured layers into vdW heterostructures will reach even beyond this goal, opening the door to new research directions and possible applications.
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