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Quantum emission from hexagonal boron nitride monolayers

Nature Nanotechnology volume 11, pages 37–41 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

Artificial atomic systems in solids are widely considered the leading physical system for a variety of quantum technologies, including quantum communications, computing and metrology1,2. To date, however, room-temperature quantum emitters have only been observed in wide-bandgap semiconductors such as diamond3 and silicon carbide4, nanocrystal quantum dots5,6,7, and most recently in carbon nanotubes8. Single-photon emission from two-dimensional materials has been reported9,10,11,12, but only at cryogenic temperatures. Here, we demonstrate room-temperature, polarized and ultrabright single-photon emission from a colour centre in two-dimensional hexagonal boron nitride. Density functional theory calculations indicate that vacancy-related defects are a probable source of the emission. Our results demonstrate the unprecedented potential of van der Waals crystals for large-scale nanophotonics and quantum information processing.

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Figure 1: Structural characterization of hBN.
Figure 2: Optical characterization of single-photon emitters in hBN.
Figure 3: Photophysical properties of single-photon emitters in hBN multilayers.
Figure 4: Proposed defect models in the hBN lattice.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank S. Lifshitz, T. Babinec and A. Magyar for discussions, and J. Fang for assistance with TEM images. The work was supported in part by the Australian Research Council (project no. DP140102721), FEI Company and by resources provided by the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre with funding from the Australian Government and the Government of Western Australia. I.A. is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award (project no. DE130100592).

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  1. School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, 2007, New South Wales, Australia

    Toan Trong Tran, Kerem Bray, Michael J. Ford, Milos Toth & Igor Aharonovich

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  1. Toan Trong Tran
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Contributions

T.T.T., I.A. and M.T. conceived and designed the experiments. T.T.T. performed the experiments and analysed the data. M.J.F. conducted the DFT simulation. K.B. assisted with the optical measurements. T.T.T., I.A., M.T. and M.J.F. co-wrote the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Milos Toth or Igor Aharonovich.

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Tran, T., Bray, K., Ford, M. et al. Quantum emission from hexagonal boron nitride monolayers. Nature Nanotech 11, 37–41 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2015.242

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