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AIP conference proceedings

Kinetics of single-photon emission from electrically pumped NV centers in diamond

Igor A. Khramtsov, Mario Agio, Dmitry Yu. Fedyanin

Published Jan 1, 2017• 9 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond are considered to be promising building blocks for emerging quantum technologies. At the same time, practical applications require them to be excited and controlled electrically. However, there is a lack of knowledge about their behavior in electrical driven systems. Here, we introduce a physical model to address the single-photon emission dynamics of electrically pumped NV center in diamond in a quantitative manner and present a detailed study of the single-photon emitting diode based on NV centers.

DOI
10.1063/1.4998087

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arXiv:1602.04394•New Journal of Physics•Jul 6, 2016•59 citations
Nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond are considered to be promising building blocks for emerging quantum technologies. At the same time, practical applications require them to be excited and controlled electrically. However, there is a lack of knowledge about their behavior in electrical driven systems. Here, we introduce a physical model to address the single-photon emission dynamics of electrically pumped NV center in diamond in a quantitative manner and present a detailed study of the single-photon emitting diode based on NV centers.
Optical sources that deliver single photons on demand play a key role in quantum cryptography and optical quantum computations. At present, color centers in wide-bandgap semiconductors, such as the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) and silicon-vacancy (SiV) centers in diamond, are considered to be the most promising candidates for practical quantum information applications owing to their unique emission properties at room temperature. However, for practical reasons, single-photon sources should be pumped electrically, which is required for integrability, scalability, and energy efficiency. However, diamond and related wide-bandgap semiconductor materials are at the interface between insulators and semiconductors, which makes electrical excitation of color centers very challenging. Here, we report on our progress in the understanding of single-photon electroluminescence of color centers in diamond, discuss different factors affecting the brightness of these emitter under electrical excitation, and study how to improve the performance of electrically- pumped single-photon sources based on color centers in diamond.
Emerging quantum information technologies require a source that emits single photons at predetermined times under electrical pumping. Color centers in diamond attract considerable attention as a room-temperature single-photon source. However, their electroluminescence has been shown only in steady-state and not on-demand. Here, we show how to control the single-photon electroluminescence (SPEL) of SiV centers in a proposed diamond diode and switch SiV center SPEL rate from 2 cps to 1 Mcps and vice versa in less than 3 ns. Our findings bring closer on-demand electrically-driven single-photon sources operating at room temperature.
For quantum information applications, nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond combine many of the advantages of atomic systems (optical access, millisecond spin-coherence times) with the engineering flexibility of solid-state devices. Recent demonstrations of coherent coupling between photons and individual NV-center spins [1,2] provide a route to integrating NV-center qubits within photonic networks and for on-demand generation of entangled single-spin/single-photon pairs. Such applications require the ability to tune the NV-center zero-phonon optical transitions, to compensate for natural sample inhomogeneities which perturb the electronic orbital states. Here we demonstrate the ability to electrically control the orbitals of individual NV centers by applying voltages to micron-scale surface gates [3]. Surprisingly, the local electric field experienced by an NV center is significantly enhanced by a photoinduced space charge resulting from photoionization of deep donor impurities within the diamond, even in high-purity single-crystal material (< 5 ppb nitrogen content). Since the photoinduced electric fields are reproducible as a function of gate voltage and are predominantly directed perpendicular to the diamond surface, we can harness them to obtain three-dimensional control of the local electric field vector with surface gates alone. To demonstrate this technique, we tune the excited-state orbital doublet of a strained NV center to degeneracy, as required for some spin-photon entanglement protocols [2], and then adjust the optical transition frequency, showing that we can tune multiple NV centers to have the same degenerate transition energy. This method should enable the coherent coupling of multiple NV center spins to indistinguishable photons within a scalable photonic network.
The realization of electroluminescence (EL) of negatively charged nitrogen vacancy (NV−) centers is important toward all-electrical control of diamond quantum devices. In this study, we demonstrated electrical excitation and detection of EL of single NV− centers by using lateral diamond p+–i(n−)–n+ diodes. It had been grown by homoepitaxy using the plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition technique. We introduced a lightly phosphorus doped i(n−) layer to stabilize the negative state of NV centers. It was estimated that the efficiency of the electrical excitation rate of the NV center was more than 30 times enhanced by introducing lateral diamond p+–i(n−)–n+ diodes structure compared with the previous vertical diode. Furthermore, the EL of a single NV− center embedded in the i(n−) layer region was characterized. The results show that the charge state of the single NV centers can be manipulated by the voltage applied to the p+–i(n−)–n+ diode, where the emission of EL is increasingly dominated by NV− in the range of 30 to 50 V.
We model and experimentally demonstrate the full time-dependent counting statistics of photons emitted by a single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond under non-resonant laser excitation and resonant microwave control. A generalization of the quantum jump formalism for the seven electronic states involved in the fast intrinsic dynamics of an NV center provides a self-contained model that allows for the characterization of its emission and clarifies the relation between the quantum system internal states and the measurable detected photon counts. The model allows the elaboration of detection protocols to optimize the energy and time resources while maximizing the system sensitivity to magnetic-field measurements.
The recently demonstrated electroluminescence of color centers in diamond makes them one of the best candidates for room temperature single-photon sources.However, the reported emission rates are far off what can be achieved by state-of-the-art electrically driven epitaxial quantum dots.Since the electroluminescence mechanism has not yet been elucidated, it is not clear to what extent the emission rate can be increased.Here we develop a theoretical framework to study single-photon emission from color centers in diamond under electrical pumping.The proposed model comprises electron and hole trapping and releasing, transitions between the ground and excited states of the color center as well as structural transformations of the center due to carrier trapping.It provides the possibility to predict both the photon emission rate and the wavelength of emitted photons.Self-consistent numerical simulations of the single-photon emitting diode based on the proposed model show that the photon emission rate can be as high as 100 kcounts s -1 at standard conditions.In contrast to most optoelectronic devices, the emission rate steadily increases with the device temperature achieving of more than 100 Mcount s -1 at 500 K, which is highly advantageous for practical applications.These results demonstrate the potential of color centers in diamond as electrically driven non-classical light emitters and provide a foundation for the design and development of single-photon sources for optical quantum computation and quantum communication networks operating at room and higher temperatures.