Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed the first silicon carbide (SiC) photonic integrated chip that can be thermally tuned by applying an electric signal. The project involved the integration of a microheater and an optical device called a microring resonator onto a SiC chip, potentially paving the wave for a new class of quantum devices. SiC is known to have defects that can be optically controlled and manipulated as quantum bits, or qubits.
“The SiC-on-insulator platform our group pioneered is similar to the silicon-on-insulator technology widely used in semiconductor industry for a variety of applications,” said Tianren Fan, member of the research team. “It enables wafer-level manufacturing of SiC devices, paving the way toward commercialization of integrated photonic quantum information processing solutions based on SiC,” said Ali A. Eftekhar, member of the research team.
The research is published in The Optical Society (OSA) journal Optics Letters.
https://www.osa.org/en-us/about_osa/newsroom/news_releases/2019/tunable_optical_chip_paves_way_for_new_quantum_dev/
