Wet-Oxidation-Assisted Chemical Mechanical Polishing and High-Temperature Thermal Annealing for Low-Loss 4H-SiC Integrated Photonic Devices

Silicon carbide (SiC) has become a promising optical material for quantum photonics and nonlinear photonics during the past decade. In this work, we propose two methods to improve the 4H-SiC thin film quality for SiC integrated photonic chips. Firstly, we develop a wet-oxidation-assisted chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) process for 4H-SiC, which can significantly decrease the surface roughness from 3.67 nm to 0.15 nm, thus mitigating the light scattering loss. Secondly, we find that the thermal annealing of the 4H-SiC devices at 1300 degrees C can help to decrease the material absorption loss. We experimentally demonstrate that the wet-oxidation-assisted CMP and the high-temperature annealing can effectively increase the intrinsic quality factor of the 4H-SiC optical microring resonators.