Spin decoherence of a heavy hole coupled to nuclear spins in a quantum dot

We theoretically study the interaction of a heavy hole with nuclear spins in a quasi-two-dimensional III-V semiconductor quantum dot and the resulting dephasing of heavy-hole spin states. It has frequently been stated in the literature that heavy holes have a negligible interaction with nuclear spins. We show that this is not the case. In contrast, the interaction can be rather strong and will be the dominant source of decoherence in some cases. We also show that for unstrained quantum dots the form of the interaction is Ising-like, resulting in unique and interesting decoherence properties, which might provide a crucial advantage to using dot-confined hole spins for quantum information processing, as compared to electron spins.