Quantum computing is a transformative technology that will change the world by quickly solving impossible problems, but its fundamental unit of information, the qubit, is nearly impossible to fabricate especially en masse with full functionality. Single crystal defects form the basis for solid-state qubits; they are materials, and their information is physical in nature requiring extreme precision in fabrication. This presentation introduce past fs work fabricating single defects in SiC and then it will expand on our very successful preliminary demonstration showing that a single low fluence UV excimer laser pulse (~0.1 J/cm2) combined with intense visible post photonic annealing (~12 J/cm2) is a viable technique for the scalable and instantaneous manufacturing of defect-based qubits in common SiC single crystals (4H-SiC). This talk will introduce and develop a multiphoton ionization model for a Coulomb explosion for excimer laser vacancy formation. Subsequent pulsed photonic annealing data of residual damage, that would otherwise cause decoherence, will be used to model displaced atom activation energies for diffusion and recrystallization. The ability to instantaneously fabricate an array of identical qubits would be a huge win for quantum computing in several ways – the power of quantum computing depends exponentially on the number of qubits; also, as qubits are highly unstable and prone to decoherence, the error correction demands far more qubits than are currently available. Future work will include machine learning; by identifying the SiC defects produced under varying UV excimer laser irradiation and post photonic annealing, we will develop an extensive library of processing condition data and corresponding defect architectures and use this database to train a machine learning algorithm to predict unrealized combinations of these inputs for the optimal combinations for future qubits which we will empirically verify. Lastly, we will then fabricate optimized defects showing long coherence time spin-dependent optical transitions, i.e., entanglement between the spin and the emitted photon.
Professor Douglas B. Chrisey is a Professor of Physics and Engineering Physics and the Jung Chair of Materials Engineering at Tulane University. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Virginia in 1987 and then joined the US Naval Research Laboratory where he spent the next 17 years. His current research interests include the novel laser and photonic fabrication of thin films and coatings of advanced electronic, sensor, biomaterial, and energy storage. These materials were used in device configurations for testing and typically have an improved figure-of-merit.