Engineered telecom emission and controlled positioning of Er3+ enabled by SiC nanophotonic structures

High-precision placement of rare-earth ions in scalable silicon-based nanostructured materials exhibiting high photoluminescence (PL) emission, photostable and polarized emission, and near-radiative-limited excited state lifetimes can serve as critical building blocks toward the practical implementation of devices in the emerging fields of nanophotonics and quantum photonics. Introduced herein are optical nanostructures composed of arrays of ultrathin silicon carbide (SiC) nanowires (NWs) that constitute scalable one-dimensional NW-based photonic crystal (NW-PC) structures. The latter are based on a novel, fab-friendly, nanofabrication process. The NW arrays are grown in a self-aligned manner through chemical vapor deposition. They exhibit a reduction in defect density as determined by low-temperature time-resolved PL measurements. Additionally, the NW-PC structures enable the positioning of erbium (Er3+) ions with an accuracy of 10 nm, an improvement on the current state-of-the-art ion implantation processes, and allow strong coupling of Er3+ ions in NW-PC. The NW-PC structure is pivotal in engineering the Er3+-induced 1540-nm emission, which is the telecommunication wavelength used in optical fibers. An approximately 60-fold increase in the room-temperature Er3+ PL emission is observed in NW-PC compared to its thin-film analog in the linear pumping regime. Furthermore, 22 times increase in the Er3+ PL intensity per number of exited Er ions in NW-PC was observed at saturation while using 20 times lower pumping power. The NW-PC structures demonstrate broadband and efficient excitation characteristics for Er3+, with an absorption cross-section (~2 × 10−18 cm2) two-order larger than typical benchmark values for direct absorption in rare-earth-doped quantum materials. Experimental and simulation results show that the Er3+ PL is photostable at high pumping power and polarized in NW-PC and is modulated with NW-PC lattice periodicity. The observed characteristics from these technologically friendly nanophotonic structures provide a promising route to the development of scalable nanophotonics and formation of single-photon emitters in the telecom optical wavelength band.