Speaker: Sridhar Majety, UC Davis ECE

Title: Triangular Cross-section Photonics in 4H-Silicon Carbide for Quantum Information Processing

Abstract: Defects in wide bandgap semiconductors, known as color centers, are prominent candidates for solid state quantum technologies due to their attractive properties, including near identical single photon emissions, optical interfacing, long coherence times, and scalability potential. Among the available host materials, silicon carbide (SiC) is desirable for its quantum-grade wafer availability and advanced processing capabilities. Photonic integration of color centers improves the light-matter interaction, resulting in enhanced emission, collection, and detection efficiencies of the color center single photons, essential for implementing quantum information processing (QIP) technologies. Challenges in maintaining the pristine quality of color centers in heteroepitaxial substrates have steered photonic integration away from the established nanofabrication processes toward alternative approaches that require non-standard sample preparation and lack scalability. Faraday cage-assisted angle etching was initially used to fabricate suspended, triangular cross-section photonic devices in bulk diamond and later demonstrated in SiC. Ion beam etching was used to achieve a wafer-scale angle etching in bulk diamond, leading to significant advancements in QIP experiments. In this work, we model novel triangular cross-section photonic devices suitable for color center integration and develop the first wafer-scale ion beam etching process to fabricate triangular cross-section photonic devices in 4H-SiC with integrated color centers. These results pave the way for SiC as a platform for large scale integrated photonics and quantum nanophotonics.