Excitation Properties of Silicon Vacancy in Silicon Carbide

Abstract

Isolated point defects possessing high spin ground state and below-band-gap excitation may play a key role in realizing solid state quantum bits in semiconductors which are the basic building blocks of quantum computers. Silicon vacancy in silicon carbide provides these features making it a feasible candidate in this special and emerging field of science. However, it has been not clarified what is the exact nature of the luminescence of silicon vacancy detected in hexagonal polytypes. This is the first crucial step needed to understand this basic defect in silicon carbide. We report density functional theory based calculations on silicon vacancy defect. Based on the obtained results we identify the silicon vacancy related photoluminescence signals with the negatively charged defect.