Single-color centers implanted in diamond nanostructures

The development of material-processing techniques that can be used to generate optical diamond nanostructures containing a single-color center is an important problem in quantum science and technology. In this work, we present the combination of ion implantation and top-down diamond nanofabrication...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hausmann, Birgit J. M., Babinec, Thomas M., Choy, Jennifer T., Hodges, Jonathan S., Hong, Sungkun, Bulu, Irfan, Yacoby, Amir, Lukin, Mikhail D.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute of Physics Publishing 2012
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/70538
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3969-3604
Description
Summary:The development of material-processing techniques that can be used to generate optical diamond nanostructures containing a single-color center is an important problem in quantum science and technology. In this work, we present the combination of ion implantation and top-down diamond nanofabrication in two scenarios: diamond nanopillars and diamond nanowires. The first device consists of a 'shallow' implant (~20 nm) to generate nitrogen-vacancy (NV) color centers near the top surface of the diamond crystal prior to device fabrication. Individual NV centers are then mechanically isolated by etching a regular array of nanopillars in the diamond surface. Photon anti-bunching measurements indicate that a high yield (>10%) of the devices contain a single NV center. The second device demonstrates 'deep' (~1 μm) implantation of individual NV centers into diamond nanowires as a post-processing step. The high single-photon flux of the nanowire geometry, combined with the low background fluorescence of the ultrapure diamond, allowed us to observe sustained photon anti-bunching even at high pump powers.