Strain-enabled control of the vanadium qudit in silicon carbide

Vanadium in silicon carbide is a promising spin photon interface candidate with optical transitions in the telecom range and a long lived electron spin, hosted in an advanced semiconductor platform. In this detailed investigation of the defect's 16-dimensional ground state spin manifold at millikelvin temperatures, a wide range of previously unreported transitions are observed which are accurately described using a theoretical model that includes strain. Using a superconducting microcoil we achieve Rabi frequencies exceeding <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><a:mrow><a:mn>20</a:mn><a:mspace width="0.28em"/><a:mi>MHz</a:mi></a:mrow></a:math> and perform the first coherent manipulation of a direct hyperfine transition. These insights further underscore the defect's potential for strain engineering and sensing, as well as for fault-tolerant qudit encoding.