High-Performance Near-Infrared Quantum Emission from Color Centers in hBN.

Abstract

Color centers hosted in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) have emerged as a highly promising platform for single-photon emission and spin-photon technologies relevant to quantum communication and quantum networking. As a wide bandgap van der Waals material, hBN can host optically active quantum defects across a broad spectral range. Here, we demonstrate a simple and scalable oxygen-plasma process that reproducibly creates single quantum emitters in hBN with blinking-free zero-phonon lines (ZPLs) spanning near-infrared (NIR) from 700 up to 971 nm. These emitters combine MHz-level brightness, single-photon purity up to 99.9%, and ultranarrow cryogenic line widths down to 2.7 GHz under quasi-resonant excitation, placing them in a particularly attractive regime for quantum photonics. Photostability measurements further reveal resistance to photobleaching, subnanometer spectral stability over long time scales, and near-shot-noise-limited intensity fluctuations. Analysis of the phonon sidebands shows weak vibronic coupling and ZPL-dominated emission, with Debye-Waller factors approaching 50%. Control experiments together with elemental mapping support oxygen incorporation as a necessary ingredient in activating the NIR emitter population, while first-principles calculations identify O_NV_N and O_NV_NH as the leading defect candidates. These results establish a high-performance NIR quantum-emitter platform in hBN for free-space quantum networking and future integrated quantum-photonic architectures.