Efficiently Engineered Room Temperature Single Photons in Silicon Carbide

Abstract: We report the first observation of stable single photon sources in silicon carbide (SiC). These sources are extremely bright and operate at room temperature demonstrating that SiC is a viable material in which to realize various quantum information, computation and photonic applications. The maximum single photon count rate detected is 700k counts/s with an inferred quantum efficiency around 70%. The single photon sources are due to intrinsic deep level defects constituted of carbon antisite-vacancy pairs. These are shown to be formed controllably by electron irradiation. The variability of the temporal kinetics of these single defects is investigated in detail.