Long-distance entanglement distribution is a vital capability for quantum technologies. An outstanding practical milestone towards this aim is the identification of a suitable matter-photon interface which possesses, simultaneously, long coherence lifetimes and efficient telecommunications-band optical access. In this work, alongside its sister publication, we report upon the T center, a silicon defect with spin-selective optical transitions at 1326 nm in the telecommunications O-band. Here we show that the T center in 28Si offers electron and nuclear spin lifetimes beyond a millisecond and second respectively, as well as optical lifetimes of 0.94(1) μs and a Debye-Waller factor of 0.23(1). This work represents a significant step towards coherent photonic interconnects between long-lived silicon spins, spin-entangled telecom single-photon emitters, and spin-dependent silicon-integrated photonic nonlinearities for future global quantum technologies.
@article{arxiv.2006.08793,
title = {A silicon-integrated telecom photon-spin interface},
author = {L. Bergeron and C. Chartrand and A. T. K. Kurkjian and K. J. Morse and H. Riemann and N. V. Abrosimov and P. Becker and H. -J. Pohl and M. L. W. Thewalt and S. Simmons},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.08793},
year = {2020}
}