Erbium-Implanted WS<sub>2</sub> Flakes with Room-Temperature Photon Emission at Telecom Wavelengths.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 40390298.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c01620 and PMC identifier 12142666.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Optically addressable spin impurities in crystals along with device engineering provide an attractive route to realizing quantum technologies in the solid state, but reconciling disparate emitter and host material constraints for a given target application is often challenging. Rare-earth ions in two-dimensional (2D) materials could mitigate this problem given the atomic-like transitions of the emitters and the versatile nature of van der Waals systems. Here we combine ion implantation, confocal microscopy, and ab initio calculations to examine the photon emission of Er-doped WS<sub>2</sub> flakes. Optical spectroscopy reveals narrow, long-lived photoluminescence lines in the telecom band, which we activate after low-temperature thermal annealing. Spectroscopic and polarization-selective measurements show a uniform response across the ensemble, while the fluorescence brightness remains mostly unchanged with temperature, suggesting nonradiative relaxation channels are inefficient. Our results create opportunities for novel solid state devices coupling 2D-hosted, telecom-band emitters to photonic heterostructures separately optimized for photon manipulation.