New single photon emitters in SiN/SiO₂

Yu-Chen Chen^1*, Shih-Chu Lin², Ya-Ching Tsai², Wen-Hao Chang^1,2

¹Research Center for Applied Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
²Electrophysics, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

* Presenter:Yu-Chen Chen, email:ycchen74@gate.sinica.edu.tw

Single photon emitters in wide bandgap materials are a promising platform for the achievements of many quantum applications, such as quantum photonics devices and scalable quantum information architectures etc [1,2]. Although a plethora of single-photon emitters have been identified in diamond and silicon carbide (SiC) [2,3], diamond and SiC are not good materials for photonic structure fabrication which is a hindrance for on-chip quantum devices developments. Thus, it has still a need to find out the spin defects in other materials with well-established photonics strucutre fabrication methods, such as nitride materials. Recently, single photon emitters have been found in many nitride materials, such as aluminium nitride (AlN) [4,5], and silicon nitride (SiN) [6].
Here, we report on a new unknown single photon emitter in SiN/SiO₂. In contrast to the report of Senichev et al. in Ref 6, the spectrum of the emitter shows a clear zero-phonon line at around 570 nm followed by a small phonon side band centred at around 620 nm. The second order photon autocorrelation function measurements of the defects show a dip well below 0.5 at g(2)(0), proving the defects are single photon emitters. The excitation power dependent photoluminescence (PL) measurements show that the saturated PL intensity is up to 45.2 kcounts/s. We also demonstrate that the fluorescence is linear polarized.
Reference
1. Bodey, J. H. et al. npj Quantum Information 5, 95 (2019).
2. Awschalom, D. D. et al. Nat. Photonics 12, 5160527 (2018).
3. M. Atatüre et al. Nat. Rev. Mater. 3, 38-51 (2018).
4. S. G. Bishop et al. ACS Photonics 7, 1636-1641 (2020).
5. Y. Xue et al. The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 11, 2689-2694 (2020).
6. A. Senichev et al. Science Advances 7, eabj0627 (2021).

Keywords: Single photon emitter, silicon nitride, quantum applications