Nanofabricated and integrated colour centres in silicon carbide with high-coherence spin-optical properties

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates nanoscale fabrication of silicon vacancy centres in silicon carbide that maintain high-coherence spin-optical properties, enabling scalable quantum information processing with integrated nanophotonic structures.

Contribution

It introduces a method to fabricate silicon vacancy centres in SiC without degrading their quantum properties, and shows controlled nuclear spin operations in integrated photonic structures.

Findings

Nearly transform limited photon emission achieved.

Record spin coherence times for single defects.

Controlled nuclear spin operations demonstrated.

Abstract

Optically addressable spin defects in silicon carbide (SiC) are an emerging platform for quantum information processing. Lending themselves to modern semiconductor nanofabrication, they promise scalable high-efficiency spin-photon interfaces. We demonstrate here nanoscale fabrication of silicon vacancy centres (VSi) in 4H-SiC without deterioration of their intrinsic spin-optical properties. In particular, we show nearly transform limited photon emission and record spin coherence times for single defects generated via ion implantation and in triangular cross section waveguides. For the latter, we show further controlled operations on nearby nuclear spin qubits, which is crucial for fault-tolerant quantum information distribution based on cavity quantum electrodynamics.