Single-Atom Control of Arsenic Incorporation in Silicon for High-Yield Artificial Lattice Fabrication

Artificial lattices constructed from individual dopant atoms within a semiconductor crystal hold promise to provide novel materials with tailored electronic, magnetic, and optical properties. These custom-engineered lattices are anticipated to enable new, fundamental discoveries in condensed matter physics and lead to the creation of new semiconductor technologies including analog quantum simulators and universal solid-state quantum computers. This work reports precise and repeatable, substitutional incorporation of single arsenic atoms into a silicon lattice. A combination of scanning tunneling microscopy hydrogen resist lithography and a detailed statistical exploration of the chemistry of arsine on the hydrogen-terminated silicon (001) surface are employed to show that single arsenic dopants can be deterministically placed within four silicon lattice sites and incorporated with 97 +/- 2% yield. These findings bring closer to the ultimate frontier in semiconductor technology: the deterministic assembly of atomically precise dopant and qubit arrays at arbitrarily large scales. Single arsenic atoms are deterministically incorporated into a silicon lattice with up to 100% yield. This is achieved using arsine gas as a precursor to arsenic incorporation via scanning tunneling microscopy hydrogen resist lithography. A detailed understanding of the surface chemistry of arsine on lithographically patterned hydrogen-terminated Si(001) underpins the fabrication of a 2 x 2 single-atom arsenic artificial lattice. image