Strain-enabled control of the vanadium qudit in silicon carbide

Vanadium in silicon carbide is a promising spin photon interface candidate with optical transitions in the telecom range and a long lived electron spin, hosted in an advanced semiconductor platform. In this detailed investigation of the defect's 16-dimensional ground state spin manifold at millikelvin temperatures, a wide range of previously unreported transitions are observed which are accurately described using a theoretical model that includes strain. Using a superconducting microcoil we achieve Rabi frequencies exceeding 20MHz and perform the first coherent manipulation of a direct hyperfine transition. These insights further underscore the defect's potential for strain engineering and sensing, as well as for fault-tolerant qudit encoding. Published by the American Physical Society 2025