2024/05/25 by Jonghoon Ahn, Ahn, Jonghoon, Christina Wicker +17
Engineering · #FOS: Physical sciences #Integrated Circuits and Semiconductor Failure Analysis #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Semiconductor materials and devices #Silicon and Solar Cell Technologies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.16303
openalex publication_date 2024/05/25 · openalex created_date 2024/05/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Optically interfaced solid-state defects are promising candidates for quantum communication technologies. The ideal defect system would feature bright telecom emission, long-lived spin states, and a scalable material platform, simultaneously. Here, we employ one such system, vanadium (V4+) in silicon carbide (SiC), to establish a potential telecom spin-photon interface within a mature semiconductor host. This demonstration of efficient optical spin polarization and readout facilitates all optical measurements of temperature-dependent spin relaxation times (T1). With this technique, we lower the temperature from about 2K to 100 mK to observe a remarkable four-orders-of-magnitude increase in spin T1 from all measured sites, with site-specific values ranging from 57 ms to above 27 s. Furthermore, we identify the underlying relaxation mechanisms, which involve a two-phonon Orbach process, indicating the opportunity for strain-tuning to enable qubit operation at higher temperatures. These results position V4+ in SiC as a prime candidate for scalable quantum nodes in future quantum networks.