Room-temperature high-purity single-photon emission from carbon-doped boron nitride thin films.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 40540575.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.adv2899 and PMC identifier 13108819.
- Licence recorded as CC BY-NC.
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Abstract
Hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) has emerged as a promising platform for generating room temperature single photons exhibiting high brightness and spin-photon entanglement. However, improving emitter purity, stability, and scalability remains a challenge for quantum technologies. Here, we demonstrate highly pure and stable single-photon emitters (SPEs) in h-BN by directly growing carbon-doped, centimeter-scale h-BN thin films using the pulsed laser deposition (PLD) method. These SPEs exhibit room temperature operation with polarized emission, achieving a <i>g</i><sup>(2)</sup>(0) value of 0.015, which is among the lowest reported for room temperature SPEs and the lowest achieved for h-BN SPEs. It also exhibits high brightness (~0.5 million counts per second), remarkable stability during continuous operation (>15 min), and a Debye-Waller factor of 45%. First-principles calculations reveal unique carbon defects responsible for these properties, enabled by PLD's low-temperature synthesis and in situ doping. Our results demonstrate an effective method for large-scale production of high-purity, stable SPEs in h-BN, enabling robust quantum optical sources for various quantum applications.