Microring resonator-based diamond optothermal switch: a building block for a quantum computing network

Abstract

The negatively-charged nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond has motivated many groups building scalable quantum information processors based on diamond photonics. This is owning to the long-lived electronic spin coherence and the capability for spin manipulation and readout of NV centers. The primitive operation is to create entanglement between two NV centers, based on schemes such as 'atom-photon entanglement' proposed by Cabrillo et al. To scale this type of scheme beyond two qubits, one important component is an optical switch that allows light emitted from a particular device to be routed to multiple locations. With such a switch, one has choices of routing photons to specified paths and has the benefit of improving the entanglement speed by entangling multiple qubits at the same time. Yield of the existing diamond cavities coupled with NV centers are inevitably low, due to the nature of randomness for NV placement and orientation, variation of spectral stability, and variation of cavity resonance frequency and quality factor. An optical switch provides the capability to tolerate a large fraction of defective devices by routing only to the working devices. Many type of switching devices were built on conventional semiconductor materials with mechanisms from mechanical, thermal switching to carrier injection, photonics crystal, and polymer refractive index tuning . In this paper, we build an optical-thermal switch on diamond with micro-ring waveguides, mainly for the simplicity of the diamond fabrication. The the switching function was realized by locally tuning the temperature of the diamond waveguides. Switching efficiency of 31% at 'drop' port and 73% at 'through' port were obtained.

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