title: Enhancement of electron spin coherence by optical preparation of nuclear spins.
abstract: We study a large ensemble of nuclear spins interacting with a single electron spin in a quantum dot under optical excitation and photon detection. At the two-photon resonance between the two electron-spin states, the detection of light scattering from the intermediate exciton state acts as a weak quantum measurement of the effective magnetic (Overhauser) field due to the nuclear spins. In a coherent population trapping state without light scattering, the nuclear state is projected into an eigenstate of the Overhauser field operator, and electron decoherence due to nuclear spins is suppressed: We show that this limit can be approached by adapting the driving frequencies when a photon is detected. We use a Lindblad equation to describe the driven system under photon emission and detection. Numerically, we find an increase of the electron coherence time from 5 to 500 ns after a preparation time of 10 micros.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Basel, Klingelbergstrasse 82, CH-4056 Basel, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Dimitrije
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Stepanenko
authors.forename: Guido
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Burkard
authors.forename: Geza
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Giedke
authors.forename: Atac
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Imamoglu