Stable single photon emitters with large Debye-Waller factor in silica
Yu-Chen Chen1*, Shih-Chu Lin2, Ya-Ching Tsai2, Chiao-Tzu Huang2, Chien-Ju Lee2, Wen-Hao Chang1,2
1Research Center for Applied Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
2Electrophysics, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
* Presenter:Yu-Chen Chen, email:ycchen74@gate.sinica.edu.tw
Single photon emitters in wide bandgap materials are a promising platform for the achievements of many quantum applications, such as quantum photonics devices and scalable quantum information architectures etc [1,2]. Although a plethora of single-photon emitters have been identified in diamond and silicon carbide (SiC) [2,3], diamond and SiC are not good materials for photonic structure fabrication which is a hindrance for on-chip quantum devices developments. Thus, it has still a need to find out the spin defects in other materials with well-established photonics structure fabrication methods, such as nitride materials and silica.
Here, we report on a new single photon emitter in silica. The spectrum of the emitter shows a clear zero-phonon line at around 580 nm followed by two small phonon sidebands, one at around 590 nm and the other one at about 630 nm. The second-order autocorrelation function measurements of the defects show a dip well below 0.2 at g(2)(0), indicating that the defects are single photon emitters. We have also conducted pulsed second-order autocorrelation function measurements on 7 single photon emitters. All the g(2)(0) values are smaller than 0.1, indicating that the reported emitters possess high single photon purity. Moreover, the Debye-Waller factors of the reported single photon emitters were measured to be between 0.5 and 0.74. These large Debye-Waller factor values are not common, and it provides great advantage to improve photon entanglement efficiency. The energy level structures of the emitters was investigated and it can be described by standard three-level system model. The excitation power dependent photoluminescence (PL) measurements show that the saturated PL intensity is up to 45.2 kcounts/s. We also demonstrated that the fluorescence is linear polarized.
Reference
1. Bodey, J. H. et al. npj Quantum Information 5, 95 (2019).
2. Awschalom, D. D. et al. Nat. Photonics 12, 5160527 (2018).
3. M. Atatüre et al. Nat. Rev. Mater. 3, 38-51 (2018).
Keywords: Single photon emission, Quantum applications, Quantum optics