Organic molecules as origin of visible-range single photon emission from hexagonal boron nitride and mica

Abstract

The discovery of room-temperature single-photon emitters (SPEs) hosted by two-dimensional hexagonal boron nitride (2D hBN) has sparked intense research interest. Although emitters in the vicinity of 2 eV have been studied extensively, their microscopic identity has remained elusive. The discussion of this class of SPEs has centered on point defects in the hBN crystal lattice, but none of the candidate defect structures have been able to capture the great heterogeneity in emitter properties that is observed experimentally. Employing a widely used sample preparation protocol but disentangling several confounding factors, we demonstrate conclusively that heterogeneous single-photon emission ~2 eV associated with hBN originates from organic molecules, presumably aromatic fluorophores. The appearance of those SPEs depends critically on the presence of organic processing residues during sample preparation, and emitters formed during heat treatment are not located within the hBN crystal as previously thought, but at the hBN/substrate interface. We further demonstrate that the same class of SPEs can be observed in a different 2D insulator, fluorophlogopite mica.

This document is the unedited Author's version of a Submitted Work that was subsequently accepted for publication in ACS Nano, copyright © 2023 American Chemical Society after peer review. To access the final edited and published work see https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.3c02348

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• Room temperature quantum emitters in van der Waals α-MoO3
• Collective single-photon emission and energy transfer in thin-layer dielectric and plasmonic systems
• First-principles computational methods for quantum defects in two-dimensional materials: A perspective
• Growth of few-layer molecular crystals of PTCDI on hexagonal boron nitride by microspacing air-gap sublimation
• Systematic investigation of the generation of luminescent emitters in hBN via irradiation engineering
• Organic molecules as single-photon sources
• Insights into the Nature of Quantum Emitters in Electron-Irradiated hexagonal Boron Nitride
• Single photon emitters in hBN: Limitations of atomic resolution imaging and potential sources of error