Purcell-enhanced emission from artificial atoms in silicon

A central challenge for optical quantum technologies is strong light-matter interaction in the form of cavity-coupled artificial atoms. However, traditional approaches use unconventional material platforms, which has led to a bottleneck in the scaling of quantum technologies. Artificial atoms in silicon have the potential to combine the long coherence times of quantum memories in diamond with the scalability of silicon semiconductor technologies and the technological maturity of the optical telecommunication bands. Here we show, for the first time, artificial atoms in silicon coupled to on-chip cavities. We generated carbon-related artificial atoms (G-centres) in commercial silicon-on-insulator photonic chips and characterized their emission in the telecommunication O-band. We used a commercial foundry to fabricate optimized 2D photonic crystal cavities in this material, and demonstrate quality factors up to 30,000 with mode volumes below 1 (λ/n)³. We demonstrate Purcell-enhanced photon emission in this system by combining spectroscopy with excited-state lifetime measurements.