Speaker
Description
Designer van der Waals (vdW) materials offers enormous opportunities to tune material properties for various applications. Isolated, optically-active defects generated in vdW materials could lead to single photon emission. 2D vdW materials as host materials for single photon emission hold various advantages, such as high optical extraction efficiency from the atomically-thin layered materials, and readiness to integrate with on-chip photonic and electronic devices. However, single photon emission from 2D vdW materials typically suffers from low purity and lack of controllability, due to the sensitivity of these atomically-thin materials to external dielectric environments, surface defects and adsorbents, and strains and wrinkles introduced during material processing. This talk introduces our recent efforts to improve the single photon purity and controllability in vdW materials. We developed novel defect structures that can overcome several current issues, and explored their electronic structure and tunability in optical emission. Through a combination of approaches, including strain engineering, heterostacking, employing optical selection rules for excitation and detection, optimization of material synthesis and handling, we were able to achieve high purity (> 98%) for single photons emitted from 2D transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) at cryogenic temperature and in hBN at room temperature. This work provides deep insights into the electronic, spin, and valley properties of TMDs and hBN. It also paves the way towards the application of 2D vdW materials for quantum optical applications. The materials engineering approaches developed here can be applied to the optimization of other optical and quantum materials.
References:
A. Chatterjee, A. Biswas, A.S. Fuhr, T. Terlier, B.G. Sumpter, P.M. Ajayan, I. Aharonovich, S. Huang, “Room-Temperature High-Purity Single Photon Emission from Carbon-Doped Boron Nitride Thin Films,” Science Advances, 11, eadv2899 (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adv2899
W. Wu, A. Strasser, Z. Xiu, K. Ngan, T. D. Hoang, S. Liu, H. Shen, L. Holtzman, J. H. Edgar, J. C. Hone, V. Perebeinos, S. Sun, J. Kono, X. Qian, S. Huang, “Ultrahigh-Purity Single-Photon Emission from 2D WSe2 via Effective Suppression of Classical Emission,” Nano Letters, accepted (2025). DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.5c01718
S. Gupta, W. Wu, S. Huang, B. I. Yakobson, “Single-Photon Emission from Two-Dimensional Materials, to a Brighter Future,” The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 14, 13, 3274–3284 (2023). DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.2c03674
| Topical Area | Emerging research and multimodal techniques |
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