Silicon Carbide and Diamond

Read the excerpts from the Harvard University Research Group’s Applied Physics and Engineering paper on SiC and Diamond

Silicon Carbide (SiC) is a wide-bandgap semiconductor already widely used for electronic and photonic devices and hosts a number of colour centres. The negatively charged silicon monovacancy centres (V_Si⁻) and divacancies (V_SiV_C) in the polytype 4H-SiC are optically active point defects with long spin coherence times and potential applications in quantum information science. Nanobeam photonic crystal cavities (PCC) allow emission enhancement to improve otherwise low count rates and collection efficiency. Additionally, these defects emit in the near-infrared range, which could allow for easier integration into telecommunications systems. 

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Diamond is a material host of more than 100different colour centres. Of particular interest is the Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV)defect, where nitrogen substitutes a carbon atom and lies next to a vacancy site in the diamond lattice. This defect luminesces in the visible regime, its spin state can be optically read out and initialized, and it can also be coherently manipulated, which makes it a leading candidate for solid-state quantum information processing.

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For the full paper please visit: https://hugroup.seas.harvard.edu/pages/diamond-and-sic

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References (see Publications):

• Enhanced cavity coupling to silicon vacancies in 4H silicon carbide using laser irradiation and thermal annealing
• Energetics and kinetics of vacancy defects in 4H-SiC
• Selective Purcell enhancement of two closely linked zero-phonon transitions of a silicon carbide color center
• Fabrication of High-Q Nanobeam Photonic Crystals in Epitaxially Grown 4H-SiC

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References:

1. Awschalom, D. D., Bassett, L. C., Dzurak, A. S., Hu, E. L. & Petta, J. R. Quantum Spintronics: Engineering and Manipulating Atom-Like Spins in Semiconductors. Science339, 1174–1179 (2013).
2. Magyar, A. P. et al. Fabrication of thin, luminescent, single-crystal diamond membranes. Appl. Phys. Lett.99, 081913–081913–3 (2011).
3. Aharonovich, I. et al. Homoepitaxial Growth of Single Crystal Diamond Membranes for Quantum Information Processing. Advanced Materials24, OP54–OP59 (2012)
4. Lee, J. C., Magyar, A. P., Bracher, D. O., Aharonovich, I. & Hu, E. L. Fabrication of thin diamond membranes for photonic applications. Diamond and Related Materials33, 45–48 (2013).
5. Lee, J. C., Aharononvich, I., Magyar, A. P., Rol, F. & Hu, E. L. Coupling of silicon-vacancy centers to a single crystal diamond cavity. Optics Express20, 8891–8897 (2012).
6. Koehl, William F., et al. "Room temperature coherent control of defect spin qubits in silicon carbide." Nature 479.7371 (2011): 84-87.

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