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arXiv:1001.4373 · Physical Review B

Chromium single-photon emitters in diamond fabricated by ion implantation

Igor Aharonovich, Stefania Castelletto, Brett C. Johnson, Jeffrey Colin McCallum, David Simpson, Andrew D. Greentree, Steven Prawer

Published Mar 15, 2010• 107 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Controlled fabrication and identification of bright single-photon emitters is at the heart of quantum optics. Here we demonstrate controlled engineering of a chromium bright single-photon source in bulk diamond by ion implantation. The Cr center has fully polarized emission with a zero-phonon line centered at 749 nm, full width at half maximum of 4 nm, an extremely short lifetime of $\ensuremath{\sim}1\text{ }\text{ns}$, and a count rate of $0.5\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{6}\text{ }\text{counts}/\text{s}$. By combining the polarization measurements and the vibronic spectra, a model of the center has been proposed consisting of one interstitial chromium atom with a transition dipole along one of the $⟨100⟩$ directions.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.81.121201

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Controlled fabrication and identification of bright single-photon emitters is at the heart of quantum optics. Here we demonstrate controlled engineering of a chromium bright single-photon source in bulk diamond by ion implantation. The Cr center has fully polarized emission with a zero-phonon line centered at 749 nm, full width at half maximum of 4 nm, an extremely short lifetime of \ensuremath∼1 ns\ensuremath{\sim}1\text{ }\text{ns}\ensuremath∼1 ns, and a count rate of 0.5\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi106 counts/s0.5\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{6}\text{ }\text{counts}/\text{s}0.5\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi106 counts/s. By combining the polarization measurements and the vibronic spectra, a model of the center has been proposed consisting of one interstitial chromium atom with a transition dipole along one of the ⟨100⟩⟨100⟩⟨100⟩ directions.
Single photon emitters are core components of quantum technologies. In this work new family of emitters based on chromium impurities in diamond is presented. The emitters can be fabricated by ion implantation of chromium into bulk diamond or incorporated during the growth of diamond nanocrystals. The remarkable photo‐physical properties of these emitters include room temperature operation, narrow photoluminescence (PL) in the near infra red and ultra bright, fully polarized photon emission with count rate of 3.2×106 counts/s. These photo physical properties make the Cr centers ideal for quantum information processing, metrology, and cellular bio markers applications.
Color centers in diamond, as single photon emitters, are leading candidates for future quantum devices due to their room temperature operation and photostability. The recently discovered chromium-related centers are particularly attractive because they possess narrow bandwidth emission and a very short lifetime. In this paper, we investigate the fabrication methodologies for engineering these centers in monolithic diamond. We show that the emitters can be successfully fabricated by ion implantation of chromium in conjunction with oxygen or sulfur. Furthermore, our results indicate that the background nitrogen concentration is an important parameter, which governs the probability of success in generating these centers.
A detailed study of the photophysical properties of several chromium-related color centers produced within chemical vapor deposition diamond is presented. These emitters show narrow luminescence lines in the range of $740\ensuremath{-}770$ nm. Single-photon emission was verified with continuous and pulsed excitation with detected emission rates at saturation in the range of ($2\ensuremath{-}3$) $\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}$ 106{10}^{6}106 counts/s, while direct lifetime measurements reveal excited state lifetimes for the distinct centers ranging $1\ensuremath{-}14$ ns. In addition, a number of quantum emitters demonstrate two-level behavior with no bunching present in the second-order correlation function. The three-level systems revealed typically photoluminescence lines with width half-maximum of  4~4 4 nm while the two-level emitters have full width half-maximum of  10~10 10 nm at room temperature. In addition, the quantum efficiency of the two-level system was measured to be four times higher than that of the three-level system.
Diamond provides unique technological platform for quantum technologies including quantum computing and communication. Controlled fabrication of optically active defects is a key element for such quantum toolkit. Here we report the production of single color centers emitting in the blue spectral region by high energy implantation of carbon ions. We demonstrate that single implanted defects show sub-poissonian statistics of the emitted photons and can be explored as single photon source in quantum cryptography. Strong zero phonon line at 470.5 nm allows unambiguous identification of this defect as interstitial-related TR12 color center.
We present direct imaging of the emission pattern of individual chromium-based single photon emitters in diamond and measure their quantum efficiency. By imaging the excited state transition dipole intensity distribution in the back focal plane of high numerical aperture objective, we determined that the emission dipole is oriented nearly orthogonal to the diamond-air interface. Employing ion implantation techniques, the emitters were engineered with various proximities from the diamond-air interface. By comparing the decay rates from the single chromium emitters at different depths in the diamond crystal, an average quantum efficiency of 28% was measured.
Color centers in diamond are very promising candidates among the possible realizations for practical singlephoton sources because of their long-time stable emission at room temperature. The popular nitrogen-vacancy center shows single-photon emission, but within a large, phonon-broadened spectrum (≈ 100 nm), which strongly limits its applicability for quantum communication. By contrast, Ni-related centers exhibit narrow emission lines at room temperature. We present investigations on single color centers consisting of Ni and Si created by ion implantation into single crystalline IIa diamond. We use systematic variations of ion doses between 108 cm-2 and 1014 cm-2 and energies between 30 keV and 1.8MeV. The Ni-related centers show emission in the near infrared spectral range (≈ 770 nm to 787 nm) with a small line-width (≈ 3 nm FWHM). A measurement of the intensity correlation function proves single-photon emission. Saturation measurements yield a rather high saturation count rate of 77.9kcounts/s. Polarization dependent measurements indicate the presence of two orthogonal dipoles.