Silicon quantum electronics

This review describes recent groundbreaking results in Si, Si/SiGe, and dopant-based quantum dots, and it highlights the remarkable advances in Si-based quantum physics that have occurred in the past few years. This progress has been possible thanks to materials development of Si quantum devices, and the physical understanding of quantum effects in silicon. Recent critical steps include the isolation of single electrons, the observation of spin blockade, and single-shot readout of individual electron spins in both dopants and gated quantum dots in Si. Each of these results has come with physics that was not anticipated from previous work in other material systems. These advances underline the significant progress toward the realization of spin quantum bits in a material with a long spin coherence time, crucial for quantum computation and spintronics.