Phosphorous exists only as a single isotope ³¹P with a nuclear spin I=1/2. Built as donor impurity into a crystalline silicon host environment, it forms a localized single electron donor state. Both the ³¹P nucleus and the donor electron have extremely long coherence times which is why they have been proposed as spin quantum information carriers (qubits) but also as classical bits for spin memory and spin electronic applications.

Our work is concerned with the investigation of electrical single electron or nuclear spin measurement concepts as the implementation of the so far hypothetical ³¹P based spin technologies will require reliable microscopic readout procedures for individual spins in order to the retrieve spin information stored in the ³¹P spin memory.

Our recent results on this topic:

D. R. McCamey*, J. van Tol, G. W. Morley, and C. Boehme* Electronic Spin Storage in an Electrically Readable Nuclear Spin Memory with a Lifetime >100 Seconds
Science 330, 1652 (2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1197931

S.-Y. Paik, S.-Y. Lee, W. J. Baker, D. R. McCamey*,  and C. Boehme* T₁- and T₂-spin relaxation time limitations of phosphorous donor electrons near crystalline silicon to silicon dioxide interface defects
Phys. Rev. B 81, 075214 (2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.81.075214 also on arXiv:cond-mat/0905.0416. http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.0416

G. W. Morley*, D. R. McCamey, H. A. Seipel, L.-C. Brunel, J. van Tol, C. Boehme*
Long spin coherence in silicon with an electrical spin trap readout
Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 207602 (2008),
also on arXiv:cond-mat/0806.3431 (2008). http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0806.3431

A. R. Stegner*, C. Boehme*, H. Huebl, M. Stutzmann, K. Lips, M. S. Brandt,
Electrical detection of ³¹P spin quantum states , Nature Physics 2, 835 (2006). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphys465
also on arXiv – quant-ph: 0607178 (2006). http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0607178