  Silicon carbide (SiC) is the leading wide-bandgap semiconductor material,
providing mature doping and device fabrication. Additionally, SiC hosts a
multitude of optically active point defects (color centers), it is an excellent
material for optical resonators due to its high refractive index and an
outstanding material for mechanical resonators due to its high Q/f product.
Moreover, epitaxial graphene layers can be grown as ultrathin electrodes and
provide the potential to fine-tune color center resonances. These
characteristics render SiC an ideal platform for experiments with single color
centers towards quantum technologies including coupling color centers towards
cooperative effects. A crucial step towards harnessing the full potential of
the SiC platform includes technologies to create color centers with defined
localization and density, e.g.\ to facilitate their coupling to nano-photonic
structures and to observe cooperative effects. Here, silicon vacancy centers
(V$_{Si}$) stand out as no impurity atom is needed and high-thermal budget
annealing steps can be avoided. We characterize the effect of localized,
femtosecond laser irradiation of SiC, investigating surface modifications and
photoluminescence including Raman spectroscopy and optical lifetime
measurements.
