The charge cycle of group IV vacancy centers in diamond: From DFT to rate equations

The silicon vacancy center in diamond is a promising system for quantum technologies due to its exceptional optical and spin properties. This has led to great interest in the silicon-vacancy center as well as in the other group IV vacancy centers. In this work, we model the charge cycle of the group IV vacancy centers from the $-2$ to $0$ charge state. As a first step, we compute the onset energies for all relevant one- and two-step ionization processes. Based on these results, we then derive the rate equations using Fermi’s golden rule.