We report the influence of static mechanical deformation on the zero-field splitting of silicon vacancies in silicon carbide at room temperature. We use AlN/6H-SiC heterostructures deformed by growth conditions and monitor the stress distribution as a function of distance from the heterointerface with spatially-resolved confocal Raman spectroscopy. The zero-field splitting of the V1/V3 and V2 centers in 6H-SiC, measured by optically-detected magnetic resonance, reveal significant changes at the heterointerface compared to the bulk value. This approach allows unambiguous determination of the spin-deformation interaction constant, which turns out to be 0.75GHz for the V1/V3 centers and 0.5GHz for the V2 centers. Provided piezoelectricity of AlN, our results offer a strategy to realize the on-demand fine tuning of spin transition energies in SiC by deformation.
@article{arxiv.2012.07588,
title = {Stress-controlled zero-field spin splitting in silicon carbide},
author = {I. D. Breev and A. V. Poshakinskiy and V. V. Yakovleva and S. S. Nagalyuk and E. N. Mokhov and R. Hübner and G. V. Astakhov and P. G. Baranov and A. N. Anisimov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.07588},
year = {2021}
}