Coupling Nitrogen Vacancy Centers in Silicon Carbide to Nanophotonic Resonators

Silicon carbide (SiC) is a promising platform for scalable quantum technologies owing to its well-established, wafer-scale industrial processing. SiC also hosts a variety of optically active color centers including the nitrogen vacancy defect that has a spin-triplet ground state. However, strong phonon coupling in the infrared range limits photon extraction from these defects. Here, we use nanophotonic structures, specifically μ-pillar and μ-disk resonators, to enhance optical collection and spin-readout. The μ-pillar geometry yields a 4-fold increase in photon collection, accompanied by a 2.4-fold reduction in spectral noise in optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) measurements. Consequently, the magnetic field sensitivity is improved by 24%. The large mode volume of the μ-disk supports resonances spanning 1150–1250 nm, enabling broadband coupling to nitrogen vacancy emission lines. Our results demonstrate that fabrication of scalable photonic structures efficiently improves performance of silicon carbide color centers for integrated quantum light generation and sensing.