Identification of divacancy and silicon vacancy qubits in 6H-SiC

Abstract

Point defects in semiconductors are relevant for use in quantum technologies as room temperature qubits and single photon emitters. Among suggested defects for these applications are the negatively charged silicon vacancy and the neutral divacancy in SiC. The possible nonequivalent configurations of these defects have been identified in 4H-SiC, but for 6H-SiC, the work is still in progress. In this paper, we identify the different configurations of the silicon vacancy and the divacancy defects to each of the V1-V3 and the QL1-QL6 color centers in 6H-SiC, respectively. We accomplish this by comparing the results from ab initio calculations with experimental measurements for the zero-phonon line, hyperfine tensor, and zero-field splitting.