Magnetic field and temperature sensing with atomic-scale spin defects in silicon carbide

Quantum systems can provide outstanding performance in various sensing applications, ranging from bioscience to nanotechnology. Atomic-scale defects in silicon carbide are very attractive in this respect because of the technological advantages of this material and favorable optical and radio frequency spectral ranges to control these defects. We identified several, separately addressable spin-3/2 centers in the same silicon carbide crystal, which are immune to nonaxial strain fluctuations. Some of them are characterized by nearly temperature independent axial crystal fields, making these centers very attractive for vector magnetometry. Contrarily, the zero-field splitting of another center exhibits a giant thermal shift of -1.1 MHz/K at room temperature, which can be used for thermometry applications. We also discuss a synchronized composite clock exploiting spin centers with different thermal response.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Intrinsic defects in silicon carbide LED as a perspective room temperature single photon source in near infrared

Generation of single photons has been demonstrated in several systems. However, none of them satisfies all the conditions, e.g. room temperature functionality, telecom wavelength operation, high efficiency, as required for practical applications. Here, we report the fabrication of light emitting diodes (LEDs) based on intrinsic defects in silicon carbide (SiC). To fabricate our devices we used a standard semiconductor manufacturing technology in combination with high-energy electron irradiation. The room temperature electroluminescence (EL) of our LEDs reveals two strong emission bands in visible and near infrared (NIR), associated with two different intrinsic defects. As these defects can potentially be generated at a low or even single defect level, our approach can be used to realize electrically driven single photon source for quantum telecommunication and information processing