skip to main content


Title: Single-Photon Emitters in SiN Integrated Quantum Photonics

We report on the generation of single-photon emitters in silicon nitride. We demonstrate monolithic integration of these quantum emitters with silicon nitride waveguides showing a room-temperature off-chip count-rate of ~104counts/s and clear antibunching behavior.

 
more » « less
Award ID(s):
2015025
NSF-PAR ID:
10348797
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Quantum 2.0 Conference 2022 Optica Publishing Group 2022
Page Range / eLocation ID:
QW4B.5
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Silicon nitride has great potential for integrated quantum photonics. We demonstrate monolithic integration of intrinsic quantum emitters in SiN with waveguides which show a room-temperature off-chip count rate of ~104counts/s and clear antibunching behavior.

     
    more » « less
  2. Abstract

    A robust process for fabricating intrinsic single‐photon emitters in silicon nitride is recently established. These emitters show promise for quantum applications due to room‐temperature operation and monolithic integration with technologically mature silicon nitride photonics platforms. Here, the fundamental photophysical properties of these emitters are probed through measurements of optical transition wavelengths, linewidths, and photon antibunching as a function of temperature from 4.2 to 300 K. Important insight into the potential for lifetime‐limited linewidths is provided through measurements of inhomogeneous and temperature‐dependent broadening of the zero‐phonon lines. At 4.2 K, spectral diffusion is found to be the main broadening mechanism, while spectroscopy time series reveal zero‐phonon lines with instrument‐limited linewidths.

     
    more » « less
  3. Single-photon emitters are essential in enabling several emerging applications in quantum information technology, quantum sensing, and quantum communication. Scalable photonic platforms capable of hosting intrinsic or embedded sources of single-photon emission are of particular interest for the realization of integrated quantum photonic circuits. Here, we report on the observation of room-temperature single-photon emitters in silicon nitride (SiN) films grown on silicon dioxide substrates. Photophysical analysis reveals bright (>10 5 counts/s), stable, linearly polarized, and pure quantum emitters in SiN films with a second-order autocorrelation function value at zero time delay g (2) (0) below 0.2 at room temperature. We suggest that the emission originates from a specific defect center in SiN because of the narrow wavelength distribution of the observed luminescence peak. Single-photon emitters in SiN have the potential to enable direct, scalable, and low-loss integration of quantum light sources with a well-established photonic on-chip platform. 
    more » « less
  4. A robust process for fabricating intrinsic single-photon emitters in silicon nitride has been recently established. These emitters show promise for quantum applications due to room-temperature operation and monolithic integration with the technologically mature silicon nitride photonics platform. Here, the fundamental photophysical properties of these emitters are probed through measurements of optical transition wavelengths, linewidths, and photon antibunching as a function of temperature from 4.2K to 300K. Important insight into the potential for lifetime-limited linewidths is provided through measurements of inhomogeneous and temperature-dependent homogeneous broadening of the zero-phonon lines. At 4.2K, spectral diffusion was found to be the main broadening mechanism, while time-resolved spectroscopy measurements revealed homogeneously broadened zero-phonon lines with instrument-limited linewidths. 
    more » « less
  5. Optically active defects in 2D materials, such as hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), are an attractive class of single-photon emitters with high brightness, room-temperature operation, site-specific engineering of emitter arrays, and tunability with external strain and electric fields. In this work, we demonstrate a novel approach to precisely align and embed hBN and TMDs within background-free silicon nitride microring resonators. Through the Purcell effect, high-purity hBN emitters exhibit a cavity-enhanced spectral coupling efficiency up to 46% at room temperature, which exceeds the theoretical limit for cavity-free waveguide-emitter coupling and previous demonstrations by nearly an order-of-magnitude. The devices are fabricated with a CMOS-compatible process and exhibit no degradation of the 2D material optical properties, robustness to thermal annealing, and 100 nm positioning accuracy of quantum emitters within single-mode waveguides, opening a path for scalable quantum photonic chips with on-demand single-photon sources. 
    more » « less