Extremely long coherence times, excellent single-qubit gate fidelities, and two-qubit logic have been demonstrated with silicon metal-oxide-semiconductor spin qubits, making it one of the leading platforms for quantum information processing. Despite this, a long-standing challenge in this system has been the demonstration of tunable tunnel coupling between single electrons. Here we overcome this hurdle with gate-defined quantum dots and show couplings that can be tuned on and off for quantum operations. We use charge sensing to discriminate between the (2,0) and (1,1) charge states of a double quantum dot and show excellent charge sensitivity. We demonstrate tunable coupling up to 13 GHz, obtained by fitting charge polarization lines, and tunable tunnel rates down to <1 Hz, deduced from the random telegraph signal. The demonstration of tunable coupling between single electrons in a silicon metal-oxide-semiconductor device provides significant scope for high-fidelity two-qubit logic toward quantum information processing with standard manufacturing.
Keywords: Silicon; quantum dots; tunnel coupling.