Imaging of optically active defects with nanometer resolution

Abstract

Point defects significantly influence the optical and electrical properties of solid-state materials due to their interactions with charge carriers, which reduce the band-to-band optical transition energy. There has been a demand for developing direct optical imaging methods that would allow in-situ characterization of individual defects with nanometer resolution. Here, we demonstrate the localization and quantitative counting of individual optically active defects in monolayer hexagonal boron nitride using single molecule localization microscopy. By exploiting the blinking behavior of defect emitters to temporally isolate multiple emitters within one diffraction limited region, we could resolve two defect emitters with a point-to-point distance down to ten nanometers. The results and conclusion presented in this work add unprecedented dimensions towards future applications of defects in quantum information processing and biological imaging.

arXiv commentManuscript has 16 pages and 4 main figures 13 SI figures and additional Supporting material

References in corpus (7)

• Multi-photon entanglement and interferometry
• Photo induced ionization dynamics of the nitrogen vacancy defect in diamond investigated by single shot charge state detection
• Photo-induced Doping in Graphene/Boron Nitride Heterostructures
• Coupling of excitons and defect states in boron-nitride nanostructures
• Complementarity of PALM and SOFI for super-resolution live cell imaging of focal adhesions
• Single spin stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy
• Nanoscale control of rewriteable doping patterns in pristine graphene/boron nitride heterostructures

Cited by in corpus (24)

• Room Temperature Initialisation and Readout of Intrinsic Spin Defects in a Van der Waals Crystal
• Identifying Carbon as the Source of Visible Single Photon Emission from Hexagonal Boron Nitride
• Revealing multiple classes of stable quantum emitters in hexagonal boron nitride with correlated cathodoluminescence, photoluminescence, and strain mapping
• First-principles identification of single photon emitters based on carbon clusters in hexagonal boron nitride
• Generation of Spin Defects by Ion Implantation in Hexagonal Boron Nitride
• Wide-field spectral super-resolution mapping of optically active defects in hBN
• Direct observation of water mediated single proton transport between hBN surface defects
• Super-resolution imaging of quantum emitters in layered materials
• Angstrofluidics: walking to the limit
• Imaging non-radiative point defects buried in quantum wells using cathodoluminescence
• Tunnel spectroscopy of localised electronic states in hexagonal boron nitride
• Liquid-activated quantum emission from pristine hexagonal boron nitride for nanofluidic sensing
• Optical control of the charge state of color centers in hexagonal boron nitride
• Probing the Optical Dynamics of Quantum Emitters in Hexagonal Boron Nitride
• Phonon sidebands of color centers in hexagonal boron nitride
• Electronic properties of substitutional impurities in graphene-like C${}_2$N, $tg$-C${}_3$N${}_4$, and $hg$-C${}_3$N${}_4$
• Stimulated emission depletion spectroscopy of color centers in hexagonal boron nitride
• Strong two-dimensional plasmon in Li-intercalated hexagonal boron-nitride film with low damping
• Direct visualization and effects of atomic-scale defects on the optoelectronic properties of hexagonal boron nitride
• Observation and Spectral Assignment of a Family of Hexagonal Boron Nitride Lattice Defects
• Stimulated Emission Depletion Microscopy with Color Centers in Hexagonal Boron Nitride
• Calibration-free single-frame super-resolution fluorescence microscopy
• Design of photonic microcavities in hexagonal boron nitride
• Super-resolved optical mapping of reactive sulfur-vacancy in 2D transition metal dichalcogenides