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Abstract High-precision placement of rare-earth ions in scalable silicon-based nanostructured materials exhibiting high photoluminescence (PL) emission, photostable and polarized emission, and near-radiative-limited excited state lifetimes can serve as critical building blocks toward the practical implementation of devices in the emerging fields of nanophotonics and quantum photonics. Introduced herein are optical nanostructures composed of arrays of ultrathin silicon carbide (SiC) nanowires (NWs) that constitute scalable one-dimensional NW-based photonic crystal (NW-PC) structures. The latter are based on a novel, fab-friendly, nanofabrication process. The NW arrays are grown in a self-aligned manner through chemical vapor deposition. They exhibit a reduction in defect density as determined by low-temperature time-resolved PL measurements. Additionally, the NW-PC structures enable the positioning of erbium (Er 3+ ) ions with an accuracy of 10 nm, an improvement on the current state-of-the-art ion implantation processes, and allow strong coupling of Er 3+ ions in NW-PC. The NW-PC structure is pivotal in engineering the Er 3+ -induced 1540-nm emission, which is the telecommunication wavelength used in optical fibers. An approximately 60-fold increase in the room-temperature Er 3+ PL emission is observed in NW-PC compared to its thin-film analog in the linear pumping regime. Furthermore, 22 times increase in the Er 3+ PL intensity per number of exited Er ions in NW-PC was observed at saturation while using 20 times lower pumping power. The NW-PC structures demonstrate broadband and efficient excitation characteristics for Er 3+ , with an absorption cross-section (~2 × 10 −18 cm 2 ) two-order larger than typical benchmark values for direct absorption in rare-earth-doped quantum materials. Experimental and simulation results show that the Er 3+ PL is photostable at high pumping power and polarized in NW-PC and is modulated with NW-PC lattice periodicity. The observed characteristics from these technologically friendly nanophotonic structures provide a promising route to the development of scalable nanophotonics and formation of single-photon emitters in the telecom optical wavelength band. 

The field of semiconductor nanowires (NWs) has become one of the most active and mature research areas. However, progress in this field has been limited, due to the difficulty in controlling the density, orientation, and placement of the individual NWs, parameters important for mass producing nanodevices. The work presented herein describes a novel nanosynthesis strategy for ultrathin self-aligned silicon carbide (SiC) NW arrays (≤ 20 nm width, 130 nm height and 200–600 nm variable periodicity), with high quality (~2 Å surface roughness, ~2.4 eV optical bandgap) and reproducibility at predetermined locations, using fabrication protocols compatible with silicon microelectronics. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, ultraviolet-visible spectroscopic ellipsometry, atomic force microscopy, X-ray diffractometry, and transmission electron microscopy studies show nanosynthesis of high-quality polycrystalline cubic 3C-SiC materials (average 5 nm grain size) with tailored properties. An extension of the nanofabrication process is presented for integrating technologically important erbium ions as emission centers at telecom C-band wavelengths. This integration allows for deterministic positioning of the ions and engineering of the ions’ spontaneous emission properties through the resulting NW-based photonic structures, both of which are critical to practical device fabrication for quantum information applications. This holistic approach can enable the development of new scalable SiC nanostructured materials for use in a plethora of emerging applications, such as NW-based sensing, single-photon sources, quantum LEDs, and quantum photonics.