Optical control of electron spin qubit in InAs self-assembled quantum dots

The spin of an electron trapped in a self-assembled quantum dot is viewed as a promising quantum bit. We present here a theory of the control of such qubits using short laser pulses to excite virtual trion states within the dots. We describe mechanisms for qubit initialisation and for performing universal one and two qubit operations. We show that, for InAs dots, initialisation can be achieved on the nanosecond time-scale, and that coherent operations can performed with laser pulses with durations of tens of picoseconds. These results are of direct relevance to current experiments