Abstract
We report on the systematic characterization of the optical properties of diamond color centers based on Pb impurities. An ensemble photoluminescence analysis of their spectral emission was performed at different excitation wavelengths in the 405–520 nm range and at different temperatures in the 4–300 K range. The series of observed spectral features consist of different emission lines associated with Pb-related defects. Finally, a room-temperature investigation of single-photon emitters under 490.5 nm laser excitation is reported, revealing different spectral signatures with respect to those already reported under 514 nm excitation. This work represents a substantial progress with respect to previous studies on Pb-related color centers, both in the attribution of an articulated series of spectral features and in the understanding of the formation process of this type of defect, thus clarifying the potential of this system for high-impact applications in quantum technologies.
Highlights
Diamond color centers have been extensively studied in the last decades as appealing systems for applications in quantum optics and quantum information processing, ranging from the use as single photon emitters to quantum sensing of magnetic and electric fields and of temperature, pressure and strain [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
Despite the increasing interest of these systems among the scientific community, only a fairly limited number of emitters related to impurities incorporated in the diamond lattice has been demonstrated so far [6, 8, 9], and most of the preliminary practical demonstrations of diamond-based quantum technologies rely on the peculiar spin properties of the negatively-charged nitrogen-vacancy color center (NV) [10,11,12,13,14,15]
Considering the ∼3 nm spectral resolution of the apparatus and the spectral blue-shifting at decreasing temperatures, these lines are compatible with the weak emission lines at 640.4 nm and 649.8 nm observed under the same excitation wavelength in reference [28]
Summary
Diamond color centers have been extensively studied in the last decades as appealing systems for applications in quantum optics and quantum information processing, ranging from the use as single photon emitters to quantum sensing of magnetic and electric fields and of temperature, pressure and strain [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. The Pb-related defects exhibited appealing emission properties for quantum information processing applications, with room temperature photoluminescence (PL) emission rates exceeding 106 photons s−1 [28], an emission mainly concentrated in the zero phonon line (ZPL) due to the low phonon coupling and a large ground-state splitting predicted by numerical simulations [29, 30], with potentially disruptive implications towards the achievement of long spin coherence for quantum memories and optical quantum networks [6]. Discrepancies in the observation of some emission peaks (namely: 520–525 nm doublet, 538 nm doublet, 715 nm line) emerged and were attributed to different experimental conditions such as excitation wavelength and operating temperatures [28, 29]
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