Abstract
Nanodiamonds hosting colour centres are a promising material platform for various quantum technologies. The fabrication of non-aggregated and uniformly-sized nanodiamonds with systematic integration of single quantum emitters has so far been lacking. Here, we present a top-down fabrication method to produce 30.0 ± 5.4 nm uniformly-sized single-crystal nanodiamonds by block copolymer self-assembled nanomask patterning together with directional and isotropic reactive ion etching. We show detected emission from bright single nitrogen vacancy centres hosted in the fabricated nanodiamonds. The lithographically precise patterning of large areas of diamond by self-assembled masks and their release into uniformly sized nanodiamonds open up new possibilities for quantum information processing and sensing.
Highlights
Nanodiamonds (ND) hosting such colour centres are promising for various biological[13] and quantum[14,15,16] technologies, thanks in part to their compatibility with biologically active tissue and with common surface modification techniques[13,17]
Control over the ND size uniformity is an important figure of merit for applications that involve building nano-hybrids[25], self-assembly processes[26,27], or integration with quantum emitters created via ion implantation[28]
Our ND fabrication process starts with commercially available bulk monocrystalline diamond (Element Six) grown by a microwave-assisted chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process
Summary
Nanodiamonds (ND) hosting such colour centres are promising for various biological[13] and quantum[14,15,16] technologies, thanks in part to their compatibility with biologically active tissue and with common surface modification techniques[13,17]. Typical commercialized techniques for ND fabrication include detonation, laser ablation, balling milling, high-pressure high-temperature (HPHT) growth, and chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth[24] These methods lack control over size or aggregation of the resulting NDs14. A fabrication approach for reactive ion etching of NDs using a sputtered gold mask with mean particle diameters of 50 nm has been demonstrated and resulted in NDs hosting implanted NVs with spin coherence times, T2, exceeding 200 μs[36] Such sputtered gold masks suffer from significant non-uniformity, and the mechanical process utilized to release diamond nanopillars from the parent diamond causes loss of material. The fabrication technique starts with CVD grown high-purity single-crystal diamond It leverages the scalability of block copolymer (BCP) self-assembly combined with sequential infiltration synthesis to define nanometre-sized etching masks across an arbitrarily large diamond sample. Statistics of the diameter of the released NDs indicate a mean diameter of about 30 nm with a variance of 5.4 nm
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