Single photon emission from graphene quantum dots at room temperature

Abstract

In the field of condensed matter, graphene plays a central role as an emerging material for nanoelectronics. Nevertheless, graphene is a semimetal, which constitutes a severe limitation for some future applications. Therefore, a lot of efforts are being made to develop semiconductor materials whose structure is compatible with the graphene lattice. In this perspective, little pieces of graphene represent a promising alternative. In particular, their electronic, optical and spin properties can be in principle controlled by designing their size, shape and edges. As an example, graphene nanoribbons with zigzag edges have localized spin polarized states. Likewise, singlet-triplet energy splitting can be chosen by designing the structure of graphene quantum dots. Moreover, bottom-up molecular synthesis put these potentialities at our fingertips. Here, we report on a single emitter study that directly addresses the intrinsic properties of a single graphene quantum dot. In particular, we show that graphene quantum dots emit single photons at room temperature with a high purity, a high brightness and a good photostability. These results pave the way to the development of new quantum systems based on these nanoscale pieces of graphene.

References in corpus (3)

• Efficient single photon emission from a high-purity hexagonal boron nitride crystal
• Near-infrared single-photons from aligned molecules in ultrathin crystalline films at room temperature
• Anisotropy and Size Effects on the Optical Spectra of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Nanomaterials for Quantum Information Science and Engineering
• Exciton-Photonics: From Fundamental Science to Applications
• Roadmap for Photonics with 2D Materials
• Deterministically Fabricated Solid-State Quantum-Light Sources
• Ultrasensitive Photoresponse of Graphene Quantum Dot in the Coulomb Blockade Regime to THz Radiation
• Optimized higher-order photon state classification by machine learning
• Origin of selective enhancement of sharp defect emission lines in monolayer WSe${}_2$ on rough metal substrate
• Insights into the Nature of Quantum Emitters in Electron-Irradiated hexagonal Boron Nitride