An ultrastable and robust single-photon emitter in hexagonal boron nitride

Abstract

Quantum emitters in van der Waals (vdW) materials have attracted lots of attentions in recent years, and shown great potentials to be fabricated as quantum photonic nanodevices. Especially, the single photon emitter (SPE) in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) emerges with the outstanding room-temperature quantum performances, whereas the ubiquitous blinking and bleaching restrict its practical applications and investigations critically. The blister in vdW materials possessing stable structure can modify the local bandgap by strains on nanoscale, which is supposed to have the ability to fix this photostability problem. Here we report a blister-induced high-purity SPE in hBN under ambient conditions showing stable quantum-emitting performances, and no evidence of blinking and bleaching for one year. Remarkably, we observe the nontrivial successive activating and quenching dynamical process of the fluorescent defects at the SPE region under low pressures for the first time, and the robust recoverability of the SPE after turning back to the atmospheric pressure. The pressure-tuned performance indicates the SPE origins from the lattice defect isolated and activated by the strain induced from the blister, and sheds lights on the future high-performance quantum sources based on hBN.

11 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (9)

• Two-Dimensional Material Nanophotonics
• Photonic quantum technologies
• Mechanical Properties of Atomically Thin Boron Nitride and the Role of Interlayer Interactions
• Square ice in graphene nanocapillaries
• Structural attributes and photo-dynamics of visible spectrum quantum emitters in hexagonal boron nitride
• Dynamics and efficient conversion of excitons to trions in non-uniformly strained monolayer WS${}_2$
• Radiation tolerance of two-dimensional material-based devices for space applications
• Piezoelectricity in monolayer hexagonal boron nitride
• Adhesion, Stiffness and Instability in Atomically Thin MoS2 Bubbles

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Femtosecond Laser Writing of Spin Defects in Hexagonal Boron Nitride
• Scalable and Deterministic Fabrication of Quantum Emitter Arrays from Hexagonal Boron Nitride
• Coherent control of an ultrabright single spin in hexagonal boron nitride at room temperature
• Coherent dynamics of multi-spin ${\mathrm{V}}_{\mathrm{B}}^{-}$ centers in hexagonal boron nitride
• Polarization and localization of single-photon emitters in hexagonal boron nitride wrinkles
• Sensitive single-photon test of extended quantum theory with 2D hexagonal boron nitride
• Laser Direct Writing of Visible Spin Defects in Hexagonal Boron Nitride for Applications in Spin-Based Technologies
• Comprehensive scheme for identifying defects in solid-state quantum systems
• Advancing the hBN Defects Database through Photophysical Characterization of Bulk hBN
• Temperature-dependent energy-level shifts of Spin Defects in hexagonal Boron Nitride
• $C_2{C}_N$ as a 2 eV Single-Photon Emitter Candidate in Hexagonal Boron Nitride
• Properties of quantum emitters in different hBN sample types particularly suited for nanophotonic integration
• Nuclear Spin-Mediated Relaxation Mechanisms of the V${}_B^{-}$ Center in hBN