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Optical Materials Express

Bottom up engineering of single crystal diamond membranes with germanium vacancy color centers

Aleksandra Trycz, Blake Regan, Mehran Kianinia, Kerem Bray, Milos Toth, Igor Aharonovich

Published Nov 20, 2019• 13 citations
Publisher

Abstract

© 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement. Color centers in diamond have garnered significant attention for applications in integrated quantum photonics. The availability of thin (~ hundred of nanometers) diamond membranes is paramount to achieve this goal. In this paper, we describe in detail a robust, reproducible and cost effective fabrication method that enables engineering high quality thin diamond membranes with uniform distribution of germanium vacancies employing microwave plasma chemical vapor deposition. We use a combination of different germanium precursors for homogeneous doping of the membranes to increase the probability of germanium incorporation into the diamond lattice. Our fabrication methodology can be further extended to implementation of other color centers in thin diamond membranes and be used for engineering quantum photonic devices.

DOI
10.1364/ome.9.004708

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© 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement. Color centers in diamond have garnered significant attention for applications in integrated quantum photonics. The availability of thin (~ hundred of nanometers) diamond membranes is paramount to achieve this goal. In this paper, we describe in detail a robust, reproducible and cost effective fabrication method that enables engineering high quality thin diamond membranes with uniform distribution of germanium vacancies employing microwave plasma chemical vapor deposition. We use a combination of different germanium precursors for homogeneous doping of the membranes to increase the probability of germanium incorporation into the diamond lattice. Our fabrication methodology can be further extended to implementation of other color centers in thin diamond membranes and be used for engineering quantum photonic devices.
Group IV color centers in diamond (Si, Ge, Sn, and Pb) have recently emerged as promising candidates for realization of scalable quantum photonics. However, their synthesis in nanoscale diamond is still in its infancy. In this work we demonstrate controlled synthesis of selected group IV defects (Ge and Sn) into nanodiamonds and nanoscale single crystal diamond membranes by microwave plasma chemical vapor deposition. We take advantage of inorganic salts to prepare the chemical precursors that contain the required ions that are then incorporated into the growing diamond. Photoluminescence measurements confirm that the selected group IV emitters are present in the diamond without degrading its structural quality. Our results are important to expand the versatile synthesis of color centers in diamond.
We demonstrate the coupling of single color centers in diamond to plasmonic and dielectric photonic structures to realize novel nanophotonic devices. Nanometer spatial control in the creation of single color centers in diamond is achieved by implantation of nitrogen atoms through high-aspect-ratio channels in a mica mask. Enhanced broadband single-photon emission is demonstrated by coupling nitrogen-vacancy centers to plasmonic resonators, such as metallic nanoantennas. Improved photon-collection efficiency and directed emission is demonstrated by solid immersion lenses and micropillar cavities. Thereafter, the coupling of diamond nanocrystals to the guided modes of micropillar resonators is discussed along with experimental results. Finally, we present a gas-phase-doping approach to incorporate color centers based on nickel and tungsten, in situ into diamond using microwave-plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition. The fabrication of silicon-vacancy centers in nanodiamonds by microwave-plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition is discussed in addition.
Single-color centers in thin polycrystalline diamond membranes allow the platform to be used in integrated quantum photonics, hybrid quantum systems, and other complex functional materials. While single-crystal diamond membranes are still technologically challenging to fabricate as they cannot be grown on a non-diamond substrate, free-standing polycrystalline diamond membranes can be conveniently fabricated at large-scale from nanocrystalline diamond seeds on a substrate that can be selectively etched. However, their practical application for quantum photonics is so far limited by crystallographic defects, impurities, graphitic grain boundaries, small grain sizes, scattering loss, and strain. In this paper, we report on a single-photon source based on silicon-vacancy color centers in a polycrystalline diamond membrane. We discuss the spectroscopic approach and quantify the photon statistics, obtaining a g2(0) ≈ 0.04. Our findings hold promise for introducing polycrystalline diamond to quantum photonics and hybrid quantum systems.
Progress in controlling diamond synthesis has made it possible to produce very pure crystals and to incorporate and control atomic impurities and carbon vacancies in the crystal lattice. The appropriate impurity-vacancy combinations can give rise to special defects known as color centers, such as the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) or the silicon-vacancy (SiV), which exhibit exceptional quantum properties with spins that are optically addressable. The use of diamond containing color centers has paved the way for the development of innovative quantum technologies, such as very high-resolution magnetometry and quantum information processing. Nevertheless, the development of quantum sensors at the nanometric scale remains one of the most interesting challenges. In this context, the development of a reliable nanoparticle synthesis technique that allows the desired defects to be incorporated and their quantum optical properties to be modulated is crucial. In this seminar, an efficient and recent method to produce diamond nanoparticles containing NV, SiV and germanium-vacancy (GeV) centers is proposed through direct plasma assisted chemical vapour deposition (CVD) growth. This technique allows good control of both nanoparticle growth processes and color centers formation. The optimization of the CVD nanodiamond growth process is presented, showing the impact of different plasma parameters and gas phasecomposition on nanoparticle crystallinity, size and shape. Morphological characterizations reveal the production of small (around 100 nm) and well faceted nanodiamond particles. In addition, the SiV and GeV color centers incorporation can be tuned within this material by varying the gas phase composition which emphasizes the high flexibility of the CVD growth technique. Finally, the quantum properties of the incorporated color centers have been successfully investigated under extreme pressure conditions (up to ~ 180 GPa) showing a monotonic blue shift of their optical zero-phonon line. Since their luminescence remains stable, SiV and GeV centers emerge as high-pressure nanosensors.
Atomic-sized fluorescent defects in diamond are widely recognized as a promising solid state platform for quantum cryptography and quantum information processing. For these applications, single photon sources with a high intensity and reproducible fabrication methods are required. In this study, we report a novel color center in diamond, composed of a germanium (Ge) and a vacancy (V) and named the GeV center, which has a sharp and strong photoluminescence band with a zero-phonon line at 602 nm at room temperature. We demonstrate this new color center works as a single photon source. Both ion implantation and chemical vapor deposition techniques enabled fabrication of GeV centers in diamond. A first-principles calculation revealed the atomic crystal structure and energy levels of the GeV center.
Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond photonic nanostructures have attracted much attention as efficient single photon emitters and quantum bits. These quantum optical devices mostly require single or low-density NV centers doped in thin diamond membranes. In contrast, this study focuses on diamond photonic nanostructures with a high concentration of NV centers to achieve a diamond color center laser with a sufficient gain available as a visible light source and a sensitive magnetic-field sensor. We employ high-dose helium ion implantation to type-Ib diamond substrates and thermal annealing, which enables us to obtain uniform thin diamond membranes containing a dense ensemble of NV centers. Luminescence spectroscopy reveals the kinetics of NV centers at high temperature from which we find an optimum annealing temperature maximizing the NV center emission while suppressing the transformation from NV to H3 centers. Furthermore, fine photonic nanowires are also successfully fabricated in the air-suspended diamond membrane, and they exhibit intense photoluminescence from the NV centers with a concentration as high as 7 × 1016 cm−3 (0.4 ppm). These results suggest a route to the fabrication of diamond photonic nanostructures containing a dense ensemble of NV centers, which can be a key material for developing diamond-based light emitting and magnetic-field sensing devices.