Ab initio characterization of coupling strength for all types of dangling-bond pairs on the hydrogen-terminated...

Recent work has suggested that coupled silicon dangling bonds sharing an excess electron may serve as building blocks for quantum-cellular-automata cells and quantum computing schemes when constructed on hydrogen-terminated silicon surfaces. In this work, we employ ab initio density-functional theory to examine the details associated with the coupling between two dangling bonds sharing one excess electron and arranged in various configurations on models of phosphorous-doped hydrogen-terminated silicon (100) surfaces. Our results show that the coupling strength depends strongly on the relative orientation of the dangling bonds on the surface and on the separation between them. The orientation of dangling bonds is determined by the anisotropy of the silicon (100) surface, so this feature of the surface is a significant contributing factor to variations in the strength of coupling between dangling bonds. The results demonstrate that simple models for approximating tunneling, such as the Wentzel-Kramer-Brillouin method, which do not incorporate the details of surface structure, are incapable of providing reasonable estimates of tunneling rates between dangling bonds. The results provide guidance to efforts related to the development of dangling-bond based computing elements.