In the worldwide endeavor for disruptive quantum technologies, germanium is emerging as a versatile material to realize devices capable of encoding, processing, or transmitting quantum information. These devices leverage special properties of the germanium valence-band states, commonly known as holes, such as their inherently strong spin-orbit coupling and the ability to host superconducting pairing correlations. In this Review, we initially introduce the physics of holes in low-dimensional germanium structures with key insights from a theoretical perspective. We then examine the material science progress underpinning germanium-based planar heterostructures and nanowires. We review the most significant experimental results demonstrating key building blocks for quantum technology, such as an electrically driven universal quantum gate set with spin qubits in quantum dots and superconductor-semiconductor devices for hybrid quantum systems. We conclude by identifying the most promising prospects toward scalable quantum information processing.
@article{arxiv.2004.08133,
title = {The germanium quantum information route},
author = {Giordano Scappucci and Christoph Kloeffel and Floris A. Zwanenburg and Daniel Loss and Maksym Myronov and Jian-Jun Zhang and Silvano De Franceschi and Georgios Katsaros and Menno Veldhorst},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.08133},
year = {2020}
}