Whether a quantum bath can be approximated as classical Gaussian noise is a fundamental issue in central spin decoherence and also of practical importance in designing noise-resilient quantum control. Spin qubits based on bismuth donors in silicon have tunable interactions with nuclear spin baths and are first-order insensitive to magnetic noise at so-called clock transitions (CTs). This system is therefore ideal for studying the quantum/classical Gaussian nature of nuclear spin baths since the qubit-bath interaction strength determines the back-action on the baths and hence the adequacy of a Gaussian noise model. We develop a Gaussian noise model with noise correlations determined by quantum calculations and compare the classical noise approximation to the full quantum bath theory. We experimentally test our model through a dynamical decoupling sequence of up to 128 pulses, finding good agreement with simulations and measuring electron spin coherence times approaching 1 s—notably using natural silicon. Our theoretical and experimental study demonstrates that the noise from a nuclear spin bath is analogous to classical Gaussian noise if the back-action of the qubit on the bath is small compared to the internal bath dynamics, as is the case close to CTs. However, far from the CTs, the back-action of the central spin on the bath is such that the quantum model is required to accurately model spin decoherence.

• Received 19 May 2015
• Revised 13 September 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.92.161403