A team led by Marina Radulaski, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Davis and recipient of a 2023 CITRIS Seed Award, has demonstrated a viable etching method to fabricate quantum photonic devices at the wafer scale, an important step towards quantum nanodevices and, eventually, the realization of the quantum internet.
Radulaski’s lab is using a method called angle etch to bombard the material at an angle from all directions to reach underneath the surface layer, revealing a suspended structure and preserving the composition of color centers within the bulk material. These color centers serve as a quantum memory bank to store information, and their functionality depends on the organization of atoms in a crystal, which classic processing techniques had previously disrupted.
Turning their attention to scalability, Radulaski and her team found that this suspension could be achieved in silicon carbide, an inexpensive and widespread material used in electronics. While quantum computing is still a long way off, Radulaski’s breakthrough demonstrates that making suspended photonics on wafers has an economic future.