Energy spectrum, exchange interaction, and gate crosstalk in a system with a pair of double quantum dots: A molecular-orbital calculation

We present a theoretical study of a four-electron four-quantum-dot system based on molecular-orbital methods, which hosts a pair of singlet-triplet spin qubits. We took into account the admixture of electron wave functions in all dots, and we found that this mixing of wave functions has consequences to the energy spectrum, exchange interaction, and gate crosstalk of the system. Specifically, we found that when the two singlet-triplet qubits are close enough, some of the states are no longer dominated by the computational basis states, and the exchange interaction cannot simply be understood as the energy difference between the singlet and triplet states. Using the Hund-Mulliken calculation of the Hubbard parameters, we characterized the effective exchange interaction of the system, and we found good agreement with results calculated by taking energy differences where applicable. We studied the two commonly conceived schemes coupling two qubits, namely the exchange and capacitive coupling, and we found that when the interqubit distance is at certain intermediate values, the two kinds of coupling are comparable in strength, complicating the analyses of the evolution of the two qubits. We also investigated the gate crosstalk in the system due to the quantum-mechanical mixing of electron states, and we found that while this effect is typically very weak, it should not be ignored if the spacing between the qubits is similar to or less than the distance between the double dots that constitute the qubit.