Etchless Silicon Carbide Quantum Chips

Quantum chips show great advantages of high stability, small footprints, and compact integration, compared to the conventional fiber-based architecture. The manufacture of these chips normally includes two key steps, which are lithography and etching. Etching transfers the pattern to the active material layer. However, etching usually needs toxic gases or chemicals, and especially dry etching also induces sidewall roughness, resulting in high light propagation loss due to the scattering. This project aims to i) propose a novel type of quantum chips based on bound states in the continuum (BIC), which excludes the etching step during the chip fabrication processing, leading to low loss and low cost in addition to environmental friendliness, and ii) experimentally demonstrate monolithical integration of the entangled single-photon sources (SPSs) in the novel BIC based low-loss quantum photonic integrated circuits (QPICs) with multiple functional components for quantum communication in silicon carbide (SiC) integrated platforms. The results of the project will demonstrate a true breakthrough in the scientific community by reporting the first etchless quantum chip.