Silicon carbide for integrated photonics

TL;DR

This paper reviews silicon carbide's potential as a versatile material for integrated photonics, highlighting its optical properties, fabrication techniques, quantum applications, and future challenges.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of SiC-based integrated photonics, including recent progress in material properties, device fabrication, and quantum information applications.

Findings

SiC offers wide bandgap and high nonlinearities suitable for photonics.

Recent fabrication methods enable low-loss, high-functionality photonic structures.

SiC shows promise for quantum information applications using optically-readable spin centers.

Abstract

The recent progress in chip-scale integrated photonics has stimulated the rapid development of material platforms with desired optical properties. Among the different material platforms that are currently investigated, the third-generation semiconductor, silicon carbide (SiC), offers the broadest range of functionalities, including wide bandgap, high optical nonlinearities, high refractive index, and CMOS-compatible device fabrication process. Here, we provide an overview of SiC-based integrated photonics, presenting the latest progress on investigating its basic optical and optoelectronic properties, as well as the recent developments in the fabrication of several typical approaches for light confinement structures that form the basic building blocks for low-loss, high functional and industry-compatible integrated photonic platform. Moreover, recent works employing SiC as optically-readable spin hosts for quantum information applications are also summarized and discussed. As a still-developing integrated photonic platform, the prospects and challenges of SiC material platform in the field of integrated photonics are also discussed, followed by potential solutions.