Tunable and high-purity room temperature single-photon emission from atomic defects in hexagonal boron nitride

Gabriele Grosso,Sajid Ali,Hyowon Moon,Igor Aharonovich,Dirk Englund,Pablo Jarillo-Herrero,Marco M Furchi,Benjamin Lienhard,Michael J Ford,Dmitri K Efetov

doi:10.1038/s41467-017-00810-2

Abstract

Two-dimensional van der Waals materials have emerged as promising platforms for solid-state quantum information processing devices with unusual potential for heterogeneous assembly. Recently, bright and photostable single photon emitters were reported from atomic defects in layered hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), but controlling inhomogeneous spectral distribution and reducing multi-photon emission presented open challenges. Here, we demonstrate that strain control allows spectral tunability of hBN single photon emitters over 6 meV, and material processing sharply improves the single photon purity. We observe high single photon count rates exceeding 7 × 106 counts per second at saturation, after correcting for uncorrelated photon background. Furthermore, these emitters are stable to material transfer to other substrates. High-purity and photostable single photon emission at room temperature, together with spectral tunability and transferability, opens the door to scalable integration of high-quality quantum emitters in photonic quantum technologies.

Highlights

Two-dimensional van der Waals materials have emerged as promising platforms for solidstate quantum information processing devices with unusual potential for heterogeneous assembly
They have emerged as promising materials for quantum information processing[3,4,5] with the discovery of stable quantum emitters in transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD)[6,7,8,9,10] and hexagonal boron nitride11–15. hBN is a layered semiconductor with a wide band gap of 5.5 eV and has attracted considerable attention for its capability to enhance electronic and optical properties of two-dimensional (2D) material heterostructures[16], and for its natural hyperbolic properties[17]
In contrast to smaller band gap semiconductors, such as TMDs, where single photon emitters (SPEs) are attributed to excitons bound to impurities[6], emitters in hBN are associated with crystallographic defects, including the antisite defect NBVN of the lattice, in which a nitrogen site is vacant and the neighbor boron atom is substituted by a nitrogen[13]

Summary

Introduction

Two-dimensional van der Waals materials have emerged as promising platforms for solidstate quantum information processing devices with unusual potential for heterogeneous assembly. Exfoliated hBN flakes show high background emission that reduces single photon purity.

Results

Conclusion