Spins in solids are cornerstone elements of quantum spintronics. Leading contenders such as defects in diamond or individual phosphorus dopants in silicon have shown spectacular progress, but either lack established nanotechnology or an efficient spin/photon interface. Silicon carbide (SiC) combines the strength of both systems: it has a large bandgap with deep defects and benefits from mature fabrication techniques. Here, we report the characterization of photoluminescence and optical spin polarization from single silicon vacancies in SiC, and demonstrate that single spins can be addressed at room temperature. We show coherent control of a single defect spin and find long spin coherence times under ambient conditions. Our study provides evidence that SiC is a promising system for atomic-scale spintronics and quantum technology.

Error correction is important in classical and quantum computation. Decoherence caused by the inevitable interaction of quantum bits with their environment leads to dephasing or even relaxation. Correction of the concomitant errors is therefore a fundamental requirement for scalable quantum computation. Although algorithms for error correction have been known for some time, experimental realizations are scarce. Here we show quantum error correction in a heterogeneous, solid-state spin system. We demonstrate that joint initialization, projective readout and fast local and non-local gate operations can all be achieved in diamond spin systems, even under ambient conditions. High-fidelity initialization of a whole spin register (99 per cent) and single-shot readout of multiple individual nuclear spins are achieved by using the ancillary electron spin of a nitrogen-vacancy defect. Implementation of a novel non-local gate generic to our electron-nuclear quantum register allows the preparation of entangled states of three nuclear spins, with fidelities exceeding 85 per cent. With these techniques, we demonstrate three-qubit phase-flip error correction. Using optimal control, all of the above operations achieve fidelities approaching those needed for fault-tolerant quantum operation, thus paving the way to large-scale quantum computation. Besides their use with diamond spin systems, our techniques can be used to improve scaling of quantum networks relying on phosphorus in silicon, quantum dots, silicon carbide or rare-earth ions in solids.

Rare-earth-doped crystals are excellent hardware for quantum storage of photons. Additional functionality of these materials is added by their waveguiding properties allowing for on-chip photonic networks. However, detection and coherent properties of rare-earth single-spin qubits have not been demonstrated so far. Here we present experimental results on high-fidelity optical initialization, effcient coherent manipulation and optical readout of a single-electron spin of Ce 3 þ ion in a yttrium aluminium garnet crystal. Under dynamic decoupling, spin coherence lifetime reaches T 2 ¼ 2 ms and is almost limited by the measured spin-lattice relaxation time T 1 ¼ 4.5 ms. Strong hyperfine coupling to aluminium nuclear spins suggests that cerium electron spins can be exploited as an interface between photons and long-lived nuclear spin memory. Combined with high brightness of Ce 3 þ emission and a possibility of creating photonic circuits out of the host material, this makes cerium spins an interesting option for integrated quantum photonics.

Optical signal propagation through underwater channels is affected by three main degrading phenomena, namely absorption, scattering, and fading. In this paper, we experimentally study the statistical distribution of intensity fluctuations in underwater wireless optical channels with random temperature and salinity variations as well as the presence of air bubbles. In particular, we define different scenarios to produce random fluctuations on the water refractive index across the propagation path, and then examine the accuracy of various statistical distributions in terms of their goodness of fit to the experimental data. We also obtain the channel coherence time to address the average period of fading temporal variations. The scenarios under consideration cover a wide range of scintillation index from weak to strong turbulence. Moreover, the effects of beamcollimator at the transmitter side and aperture averaging lens at the receiver side are experimentally investigated. We show that the use of a transmitter beam-collimator and/or a receiver aperture averaging lens suits single-lobe distributions such that the generalized Gamma and exponentiated Weibull distributions can excellently match the histograms of the acquired data. Our experimental results further reveal that the channel coherence time is on the order of 10 −3 seconds and larger which implies to the slow fading turbulent channels.

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Recent efforts to define microscopic solid-immersion-lenses (SIL) by focused ion beam milling into diamond substrates that are registered to a preselected single photon emitter are summarized. We show how we determine the position of a single emitter with at least 100 nm lateral and 500 nm axial accuracy, and how the milling procedure is optimized. The characteristics of a single emitter, a Nitrogen Vacancy (NV) center in diamond, are measured before and after producing the SIL and compared with each other. A count rate of 1.0 million counts per second is achieved with a [111] oriented NV center.

Abstract-In this paper, we experimentally investigate the statistical distribution of intensity fluctuations for underwater wireless optical channels under different channel conditions, namely fresh and salty underwater channels with and without air bubbles. To do so, we first measure the received optical signal with a large number of samples. Based on the normalized acquired data the channel coherence time and the fluctuations probability density function (PDF) are obtained for different channel scenarios. Our experimental results show that salt attenuates the received signal while air bubbles mainly introduce severe intensity fluctuations. Moreover, we observe that log-normal distribution precisely fits the acquired data PDF for scintillation index (σ 2 I ) values less than 0.1, while Gamma-Gamma and K distributions aptly predict the intensity fluctuations for σ 2 I > 1. Since neither of these distributions are capable of predicting the received irradiance for 0.1 < σ 2 I < 1, we propose a combination of an exponential and a log-normal distributions to perfectly describe the acquired data PDF for such regimes of scintillation index.

Abstract-In this paper, we characterize the performance of relay-assisted underwater wireless optical code division multiple access (OCDMA) networks over turbulent channels. In addition to scattering and absorption effects of underwater channels, we also consider optical turbulence as a log-normal fading coefficient in our analysis. To simultaneously and asynchronously share medium among many users, we assign a unique optical orthogonal code (OOC) to each user in order to actualize OCDMAbased underwater network. The most significant challenge in underwater optical communication is in the ability to extend the short range of its coverage. In order to expand the viable communication range, we consider multi-hop transmission to the destination. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of a relayassisted point-to-point UWOC system as a special case of the proposed relay-assisted OCDMA network. Our numerical results indicate significant performance improvement by employing intermediate relays, e.g., one can achieve 32 dB improvement in the bit error rate (BER) of 10 −6 using only a dual-hop transmission in a 90 m point-to-point clear ocean link.