Cavity-enhanced measurements of defect spins in silicon carbide

Abstract

The identification of new solid-state defect-qubit candidates in widely used semiconductors has the potential to enable the use of nanofabricated devices for enhanced qubit measurement and control operations. In particular, the recent discovery of optically active spin states in silicon carbide thin films offers a scalable route for incorporating defect qubits into on-chip photonic devices. Here, we demonstrate the use of 3C silicon carbide photonic crystal cavities for enhanced excitation of color-center defect spin ensembles in order to increase measured photoluminescence signal count rates, optically detected magnetic-resonance signal intensities, and optical spin initialization rates. We observe an up to a factor of 30 increase in the photoluminescence and optically detected magnetic-resonance signals from Ky5 color centers excited by cavity-resonant excitation and increase the rate of ground-state spin initialization by approximately a factor of 2. Furthermore, we show that the 705-fold reduction in excitation mode volume and enhanced excitation and collection efficiencies provided by the structures can be used to overcome inhomogenous broadening in order to facilitate the study of defect-qubit subensemble properties. These results highlight some of the benefits that nanofabricated devices offer for engineering the local photonic environment of color-center defect qubits to enable applications in quantum information and sensing

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Alberto Politi: orcid.org/0000-0002-3668-9474

Catalogue record

Export record

Altmetrics