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Progress in Informatics

Enhancing photon collection from quantum emitters in diamond

Michael Trupke, William J. Munro, Kae Nemoto, Jörg Schmiedmayer

Published Mar 1, 2011• 10 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Diamond has recently become one of the leading candidates for applications in quantum communication and quantum computing.Diamond color centers are ideal as single photon sources.In this article we give an overview of the various techniques that can be used to improve the collection of photons from these emitters.These range from solid immersion lenses to Purcell-enhancement in microstructures and microcavities.

DOI
10.2201/niipi.2011.8.4

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Diamond has recently become one of the leading candidates for applications in quantum communication and quantum computing.Diamond color centers are ideal as single photon sources.In this article we give an overview of the various techniques that can be used to improve the collection of photons from these emitters.These range from solid immersion lenses to Purcell-enhancement in microstructures and microcavities.
The exploitation of emerging quantum technologies requires efficient fabrication of key building blocks. Sources of single photons are extremely important across many applications as they can serve as vectors for quantum information—thereby allowing long-range (perhaps even global-scale) quantum states to be made and manipulated for tasks such as quantum communication or distributed quantum computation. At the single-emitter level, quantum sources also afford new possibilities in terms of nanoscopy and bio-marking. Color centers in diamond are prominent candidates to generate and manipulate quantum states of light, as they are a photostable solid-state source of single photons at room temperature. In this review, we discuss the state of the art of diamond-based single-photon emitters and highlight their fabrication methodologies. We present the experimental techniques used to characterize the quantum emitters and discuss their photophysical properties. We outline a number of applications including quantum key distribution, bio-marking and sub-diffraction imaging, where diamond-based single emitters are playing a crucial role. We conclude with a discussion of the main challenges and perspectives for employing diamond emitters in quantum information processing.
Solid-state quantum emitters such as the N-VVV center in diamond have applications ranging from single-photon sources to quantum sensors, with some quantum properties preserved even under ambient conditions. A central challenge is to access these quantum properties efficiently, by catching as much emitted light as possible. In this study a tunable optical microcavity, with a mode volume as small as one wavelength cubed, is used to enhance spontaneous emission of single N-VVV centers in diamond, via the Purcell effect. This allows the authors to extract large amounts of light from several individually addressable emitters, and to control their spontaneous-emission rate.
The nitrogen-vacancy defect in diamond (NV centre) is a leading candidate for solid-state implementations of quantum information technologies. Among other useful properties, it is a bright source of single photons. It is difficult, though, to collect the emitted photons in a single spatial and spectral mode which is often needed for quantum information applications. One way to improve the single-mode collection efficiency is to embed an NV centre in a high-finesse cavity. The coupling of the NV centre dipole to the cavity mode gives rise to the Purcell enhancement -- an increase of the emission into the cavity's spectral and spatial mode. The goal of this project will be to develop a fibre-based microcavity and to use it for the observation of enhanced single-photon emission from a diamond nanocrystal. It will involve a wide range of experimental techniques, for example basic optics (particularly Gaussian beam propagation), CO2 laser ablation, surface analysis by optical and atomic force microscopes, interferometry, photon counting, etc. There will also be a certain amount of data analysis, simulations and theoretical calculations.
The past decade has seen great advances in developing color centers in diamond for sensing, quantum information processing, and tests of quantum foundations. Increasingly, the success of these applications as well as fundamental investigations of light-matter interaction depend on improved control of optical interactions with color centers -- from better fluorescence collection to efficient and precise coupling with confined single optical modes. Wide ranging research efforts have been undertaken to address these demands through advanced nanofabrication of diamond. This review will cover recent advances in diamond nano- and microphotonic structures for efficient light collection, color center to nanocavity coupling, hybrid integration of diamond devices with other material systems, and the wide range of fabrication methods that have enabled these complex photonic diamond systems.
Single-photon sources (SPS) play a key-role in many applications, spanning from quantum metrology, to quantum information and to the foundations of quantum mechanics. Even if an ideal SPS (i. e. emitting indistinguishable, ”on-demand” single photons, at an arbitrarily fast repetition rate) is far to be realized due to real-world deviations from the ideality, much effort is currently devoted to improving the performance of real sources. With regards to the emission probability, it appears natural to employ sources that are in principle deterministic in the single- photon emission (single quantum emitters such as single atoms, ions, molecules, quantum dots, or color centers in diamond) as opposed to probabilistic ones (usually heralded SPS based on parametric down-conversion). We present an overview of our latest results concerning a work-in-progress NIR pulsed single photon source based on single quantum emitters (color centers in diamond) exploiting recently reported centers. They are particularly interesting because of the narrow emission line (tipically less than 5 nm), the shorter excited state lifetime with respect to NV centres (1 - 2 ns compared to 12 ns, allowing a ten-fold photon emission rate upon saturation) and the polarized emission.