Single-spin manipulation in a double quantum dot in the field of a micromagnet

The manipulation of single spins in double quantum dots by making use of the exchange interaction and a highly inhomogeneous magnetic field was discussed in Coish and Loss [Phys. Rev. B 75, 161302 (2007)]. However, such large inhomogeneity is difficult to achieve through the slanting field of a micromagnet in current designs of lateral double dots. Therefore, we examine an analogous spin manipulation scheme directly applicable to realistic GaAs double dot setups. We estimate that typical gate times, realized at the singlet-triplet anticrossing induced by the inhomogeneous micromagnet field, can be a few nanoseconds. We discuss the optimization of initialization, read-out, and single-spin gates through suitable choices of detuning pulses and an improved geometry. We also examine the effect of nuclear dephasing and charge noise. The latter induces fluctuations of both detuning and tunneling amplitude. Our results suggest that this scheme is a promising approach for the realization of fast single-spin operations.