The decoherence of mixed electron-nuclear spin qubits is a topic of great current importance, but understanding is still lacking: While important decoherence mechanisms for spin qubits arise from quantum spin bath environments with slow decay of correlations, the only analytical framework for explaining observed sharp variations of decoherence times with magnetic field is based on the suppression of classical noise. Here we obtain a general expression for decoherence times of the central spin system which exposes significant differences between quantum-bath decoherence and decoherence by classical field noise. We perform measurements of decoherence times of bismuth donors in natural silicon using both electron spin resonance (ESR) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) transitions, and in both cases find excellent agreement with our theory across a wide parameter range. The universality of our expression is also tested by quantitative comparisons with previous measurements of decoherence around “optimal working points” or “clock transitions” where decoherence is strongly suppressed. We further validate our results by comparison to cluster expansion simulations.

• Received 26 July 2013
• Revised 19 December 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.89.045403