PhD Scholarship; DC- Fabrication and characterization of localized single photon sources

Overview

Organisation/Company Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica Department Advanced Materials and Life Science Metrology Research Field Engineering » Electronic engineering Physics » Optics Physics » Solid state physics Researcher Profile First Stage Researcher (R1) Positions PhD Positions Country Italy Final date to receive applications 1 Mar 2026 - 23:59 (Europe/Rome) Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Hours Per Week 36 Offer Starting Date 1 Oct 2026 Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme?

Horizon Europe - MSCA Marie Curie Grant Agreement Number  Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No

The Advanced Materials and Devices group at the Italian National Institute of Metro logical Research (INRiM) is seeking a candidate for a PhD position (36 months) to fabricate single photon sources in SiCOI platform by direct laser irradiation and characterize their emissive properties for application in quantum communication.

This position is part of "
Silicon carbide photonic integrated circuit (SiCPIC)," a European Doctoral Network project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action(MSCA) Grant Agreement No. .

SiCPIC’s project offers:

• International
  
  Collaboration:
  
  The PhD candidate will join an international team of 15 doctoral students across five European countries, partnering with 5 universities and one company.
• Research Focus: All 15 PhD projects fall under the project theme of Silicon Carbide on Insulator (SiCOI) devices and integration for applications in classic and quantum optical telecommunication and optical sensing.

This PhD project will take place at INRiM; additionally, the position includes mandatory international planned secondment and comprehensive training:

• DTU, Kongens Lyngby (DK), (6 months), gaining knowledge in the characterization of single photon emitters.
• Training & Networking: The student will participate in common meetings with the other 14 PhD students in the network, including three dedicated training schools.

As a participant of the project, the PhD student will become part of a team at INRiM in the Advanced Materials and Devices group, with expertise in design, fabrication and characterization of photonic devices. The activities within the project will benefit from synergies with other projects in the group as well as with other activities at the institute. The main supervisor will be Senior Researcher Angelo Angelini, INRiM.

Thanks to the unique photonic properties and physical properties of SiC, versatile devices could be achieved on the SiC material platform. Among other photonic properties such as high second-order and third-order nonlinearity, SiC is a promising host for color centers showing intriguing properties as quantum light sources. The project aims at generating and characterizing quantum light sources in SiC, together with developing fabrication strategies to integrate light sources in photonic devices that can further enhance their emissive properties.

The PhD project will be structured as follows:

• Objectives
  :
• Design and set up an experimental bench for the generation of color centers in SiC via direct laser irradiation;
• Characterize the emissive properties of color centers, in particular in terms of lifetime, emission spectrum and autocorrelation function;
• Fabricate SiCOI photonic devices to engineer the emissive properties of color centers;
• Integration of color centers in SiC photonic integrated circuits.
• Expected Results:

The primary expected result is that DC8 will acquire advanced experimental skills in time-resolved fluorescence microscopy and will be able to fabricate photonic structures using conventional lithographic techniques, and will interact with other DCs (primarily DC7, DC10, DC11 and DC13) to provide feedbacks for the modeling and receive input for the fabrication and characterization. In detail the expected results are:

• Direct writing of single photon sources in SiCOI by femtosecond laser pulses
• Time-resolved fluorescence characterization of single photon sources in SiCOI…