Abstract
The search for an ideal single-photon source has generated significant interest in discovering emitters in materials as well as developing new manipulation techniques to gain better control over the emitters' properties. Quantum emitters in atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials have proven to be very attractive with high brightness, operation under ambient conditions, and the ability to be integrated with a wide range of electronic and photonic platforms. This Perspective highlights some of the recent advances in quantum light generation from 2D materials, focusing on hexagonal boron nitride and transition metal dichalcogenides. Efforts in engineering and deterministically creating arrays of quantum emitters in 2D materials, their electrical excitation, and their integration with photonic devices are discussed. Finally, we address some of the challenges the field is facing and the near-term efforts to tackle them. We provide an outlook toward efficient and scalable quantum light generation from 2D materials to controllable and addressable on-chip quantum sources.
Highlights
Two-dimensional (2D) materials, such as graphene, hexagonal boron nitride, and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), are a nascent family of materials. 2D materials exhibit quantum properties that are generally absent in their bulk counterparts; this includes a layer-dependent bandgap,[1] large exciton binding energies,[2] strong nonlinearities, tunable valley degree of freedom, the ability to host quantum emitters,[3] and spin-defects.[4]
Considering that high-quality single-photon emission from III-V quantum dots was only achieved after nearly three decades, the rapid trajectory of ever-improving single-photon emitters (SPEs) in 2D materials is promising
SPE metrics such as brightness, purity, and indistinguishability have been improved by orders of magnitude since their discovery
Summary
Two-dimensional (2D) materials, such as graphene, hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), are a nascent family of materials. 2D materials exhibit quantum properties that are generally absent in their bulk counterparts; this includes a layer-dependent bandgap,[1] large exciton binding energies,[2] strong nonlinearities, tunable valley degree of freedom, the ability to host quantum emitters,[3] and spin-defects.[4]. The large library of available 2D materials,[2] combined with the ability to stack them with precisely controlled alignment and orientation,[5] provides a unique platform for the realization of atomically smooth and thin heterostructures, known as Van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures, with well-controlled and tunable optoelectronic properties and quantum confinement This unique set of properties has turned the 2D materials into an exciting test bed for exploring novel quantum phenomena such as quantum light generation,[3] spinqubit applications, valley-spintronics,[6] and twisted moire superlattices for engineering correlated many-body physics.[2,7,8,9]. Engineering quantum confinement in 2D materials has attracted particular interest in recent years with several seminal papers demonstrating atomic defect-based single-photon emitters (SPEs) in transition metal dichalcogenides and hexagonal boron nitride. For more in-depth reviews on the physics of SPEs in 2D materials and other platforms, we refer the readers to reviews found in Refs. 3, 10, and 25
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