Protecting quantum information in quantum dot spin chains by driving exchange interactions periodically

Recent work has demonstrated a new route to discrete time crystal physics in quantum spin chains by periodically driving nearest-neighbor exchange interactions in gate-defined quantum dot arrays [H. Qiao et al., Nat. Commun. 12, 2142 (2021)]. Here, we present a detailed analysis of exchange-driven Floquet physics in small arrays of GaAs quantum dots, including phase diagrams and additional diagnostics. We also show that emergent time-crystalline behavior can benefit the protection and manipulation of multispin states. For typical levels of nuclear spin noise in GaAs, the combination of driving and interactions increases the coherence times of entangled states by orders of magnitude. Similar results can be obtained for other quantum dot systems such as in Si. We further show how to construct a time-crystal-inspired cz gate between singlet-triplet qubits with high fidelity. These results show that periodically driving exchange couplings can enhance the performance of quantum dot spin systems for quantum information applications.