No Arabic abstract
Silicon Carbide is a promising host material for spin defect based quantum sensors owing to its commercial availability and established techniques for electrical and optical microfabricated device integration. The negatively charged silicon vacancy is one of the leading spin defects studied in silicon carbide owing to its near telecom photoemission, high spin number, and nearly temperature independent ground state zero field splitting. We report the realization of nanoTesla shot-noise limited ensemble magnetometry based on optically detected magnetic resonance with the silicon vacancy in 4H silicon carbide. By coarsely optimizing the anneal parameters and minimizing power broadening, we achieved a sensitivity of 3.5 nT/$sqrt{Hz}$. This was accomplished without utilizing complex photonic engineering, control protocols, or applying excitation powers greater than a Watt. This work demonstrates that the silicon vacancy in silicon carbide provides a low-cost and simple approach to quantum sensing of magnetic fields.
We uncover the fine structure of a silicon vacancy in isotopically purified silicon carbide (4H-$^{28}$SiC) and find extra terms in the spin Hamiltonian, originated from the trigonal pyramidal symmetry of this spin-3/2 color center. These terms give rise to additional spin transitions, which are otherwise forbidden, and lead to a level anticrossing in an external magnetic field. We observe a sharp variation of the photoluminescence intensity in the vicinity of this level anticrossing, which can be used for a purely all-optical sensing of the magnetic field. We achieve dc magnetic field sensitivity of 87 nT Hz$^{-1/2}$ within a volume of $3 times 10^{-7}$ mm$^{3}$ at room temperature and demonstrate that this contactless method is robust at high temperatures up to at least 500 K. As our approach does not require application of radiofrequency fields, it is scalable to much larger volumes. For an optimized light-trapping waveguide of 3 mm$^{3}$ the projection noise limit is below 100 fT Hz$^{-1/2}$.
Defects in silicon carbide have been explored as promising spin systems in quantum technologies. However, for practical quantum metrology and quantum communication, it is critical to achieve the on-demand shallow spin-defect generation. In this work, we present the generation and characterization of shallow silicon vacancies in silicon carbide by using different implanted ions and annealing conditions. The conversion efficiency of silicon vacancy of helium ions is shown to be higher than that by carbon and hydrogen ions in a wide implanted fluence range. Furthermore, after optimizing annealing conditions, the conversion efficiency can be increased more than 2 times. Due to the high density of the generated ensemble defects, the sensitivity to sense a static magnetic field can be research as high as , which is about 15 times higher than previous results. By carefully optimizing implanted conditions, we further show that a single silicon vacancy array can be generated with about 80 % conversion efficiency, which reaches the highest conversion yield in solid state systems. The results pave the way for using on-demand generated shallow silicon vacancy for quantum information processing and quantum photonics.
Color centers in silicon carbide have increasingly attracted attention in recent years owing to their excellent properties such as single photon emission, good photostability, and long spin coherence time even at room temperature. As compared to diamond which is widely used for holding Nitrogen-vacancy centers, SiC has the advantage in terms of large-scale, high-quality and low cost growth, as well as advanced fabrication technique in optoelectronics, leading to the prospects for large scale quantum engineering. In this paper, we report experimental demonstration of the generation of nanoscale $V_{Si}$ single defect array through ion implantation without the need of annealing. $V_{Si}$ defects are generated in pre-determined locations with resolution of tens of nanometers. This can help in integrating $V_{Si}$ defects with the photonic structures which, in turn, can improve the emission and collection efficiency of $V_{Si}$ defects when it is used in spin photonic quantum network. On the other hand, the defects are shallow and they are generated $sim 40nm$ below the surface which can serve as critical resources in quantum sensing application.
Optically interfaced spins in the solid promise scalable quantum networks. Robust and reliable optical properties have so far been restricted to systems with inversion symmetry. Here, we release this stringent constraint by demonstrating outstanding optical and spin properties of single silicon vacancy centres in silicon carbide. Despite the lack of inversion symmetry, the systems particular wave function symmetry decouples its optical properties from magnetic and electric fields, as well as from local strain. This provides a high-fidelity spin-to-photon interface with exceptionally stable and narrow optical transitions, low inhomogeneous broadening, and a large fraction of resonantly emitted photons. Further, the weak spin-phonon coupling results in electron spin coherence times comparable with nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond. This allows us to demonstrate coherent hyperfine coupling to single nuclear spins, which can be exploited as qubit memories. Our findings promise quantum network applications using integrated semiconductor-based spin-to-photon interfaces.
Quantum systems combining indistinguishable photon generation and spin-based quantum information processing are essential for remote quantum applications and networking. However, identification of suitable systems in scalable platforms remains a challenge. Here, we investigate the silicon vacancy centre in silicon carbide and demonstrate controlled emission of indistinguishable and distinguishable photons via coherent spin manipulation. Using strong off-resonant excitation and collecting photons from the ultra-stable zero-phonon line optical transitions, we show a two-photon interference contrast close to 90% in Hong-Ou-Mandel type experiments. Further, we exploit the systems intimate spin-photon relation to spin-control the colour and indistinguishability of consecutively emitted photons. Our results provide a deep insight into the systems spin-phonon-photon physics and underline the potential of the industrially compatible silicon carbide platform for measurement-based entanglement distribution and photonic cluster state generation. Additional coupling to quantum registers based on recently demonstrated coupled individual nuclear spins would further allow for high-level network-relevant quantum information processing, such as error correction and entanglement purification.