Cavity-coupled telecom atomic source in silicon

Abstract: Atomic defects in solid-state materials are promising candidates for quantum interconnect and networking applications. Recently, a series of atomic defects have been identified in the silicon platform, where scalable device integration can be enabled by mature silicon photonics and electronics technologies. In particular, T centers hold great promise due to their telecom band optical transitions and the doublet ground state electronic spin manifold with long coherence times. However, an open challenge for advancing the T center platform is to enhance its weak and slow zero phonon line emission. In this work, we demonstrate the cavity-enhanced fluorescence emission from a single T center. This is realized by integrating single T centers with a low-loss, small mode-volume silicon photonic crystal cavity, which results in an enhancement of the fluorescence decay rate by a factor of $F$ = 6.89. Efficient photon extraction enables the system to achieve an average photon outcoupling rate of 73.3 kHz at the zero phonon line. The dynamics of the coupled system is well modeled by solving the Lindblad master equation. These results represent a significant step towards building efficient T center spin-photon interfaces for quantum information processing and networking applications.