Southwest Quantum Information and Technology

Dynamics of silicon-vacancy color center in nanodiamonds

Presenting Author: Chunjing Jia, Stanford University
Contributing Author(s): Yan-Kai Tzeng, Yu Lin

Abstract: Diamond-based color centers have emerged for a variety of applications in quantum communication and quantum photonics, etc. Optical color center of SiV formed by one silicon atom sited in the middle of two vacancies shows great promise as a single-photon source. Unlike the NV center, which can be improved sufficiently for quantum applications by high-temperature annealing to mobilize only vacancies, SiV center may become unstable in diamond lattice under annealing. Upon annealing to temperatures up to 800 °C, both SiVs and vacancies would become mobile to the surface of diamond. It is unclear during the annealing process whether SiV or vacancy impurity migration dominates and the relative time-scale of the two processes. To unravel this problem, in this poster we will present our ab initio DFT calculations to quantify the dynamics of two impurities. Our theoretical results show that SiV centers can indeed be stabilized associated with the crystalline quality during the production of artificial SiV photonic centers. This is consistent with what have been found in the laser heating and annealing experiments conducted by our collaborators.

(Session 5 : Saturday from 5:00pm - 7:00pm)