Sub-10 nm fabrication:methods and applications

Reliable fabrication of micro/nanostructures with sub-10 nm features is of great significance for advancing nanoscience and nanotechnology.While the capability of current complementary metal-oxide semiconductor(CMOS)chip manufacturing can produce structures on the sub-10 nm scale,many emerging applications,such as nano-optics,biosensing,and quantum devices,also require ultrasmall features down to single digital nanometers.In these emerging applications,CMOS-based manufacturing methods are currently not feasible or appropriate due to the considerations of usage cost,material compatibility,and exotic features.Therefore,several specific methods have been developed in the past decades for different applications.In this review,we attempt to give a systematic summary on sub-10 nm fabrication methods and their related applications.In the first and second parts,we give a brief introduction of the background of this research topic and explain why sub-10 nm fabrication is interesting from both scientific and technological perspectives.In the third part,we comprehensively summarize the fabrication methods and classify them into three main approaches,including lithographic,mechanics-enabled,and post-trimming processes.The fourth part discusses the applications of these processes in quantum devices,nano-optics,and high-performance sensing.Finally,a perspective is given to discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with this research topic.

Scalable fast benchmarking for individual quantum gates with local twirling

With the development of controllable quantum systems,fast and practical characterization of multi-qubit gates has become essential for building high-fidelity quantum computing devices.The usual way to fulfill this requirement via randomized benchmarking demands complicated implementation of numerous multi-qubit twirling gates.How to efficiently and reliably estimate the fidelity of a quantum process remains an open problem.This work thus proposes a character-cycle benchmarking protocol and a character-average benchmarking protocol using only local twirling gates to estimate the process fidelity of an individual multi-qubit operation.Our protocols were able to characterize a large class of quantum gates including and beyond the Clifford group via the local gauge transformation,which forms a universal gate set for quantum computing.We demonstrated numerically our protocols for a non-Clifford gate—controlled-(T X)and a Clifford gate—five-qubit quantum errorcorrecting encoding circuit.The numerical results show that our protocols can efficiently and reliably characterize the gate process fidelities.Compared with the cross-entropy benchmarking,the simulation results show that the character-average benchmarking achieves three orders of magnitude improvements in terms of sampling complexity.