Authors
Sean Doan, Sahil D Patel, Yilin Chen, Jordan A Gusdorff, Mark E Turiansky, Luis Villagomez, Luka Jevremovic, Nicholas Lewis, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Lee C Bassett, Chris Van de Walle, Galan Moody
Published in
ACS nano. Jul 02, 2026. Epub Jul 02, 2026.
Abstract
Color centers hosted in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) have emerged as a highly promising platform for single-photon emission and spin-photon technologies relevant to quantum communication and quantum networking. As a wide bandgap van der Waals material, hBN can host optically active quantum defects across a broad spectral range. Here, we demonstrate a simple and scalable oxygen-plasma process that reproducibly creates single quantum emitters in hBN with blinking-free zero-phonon lines (ZPLs) spanning near-infrared (NIR) from 700 up to 971 nm. These emitters combine MHz-level brightness, single-photon purity up to 99.9%, and ultranarrow cryogenic line widths down to 2.7 GHz under quasi-resonant excitation, placing them in a particularly attractive regime for quantum photonics. Photostability measurements further reveal resistance to photobleaching, subnanometer spectral stability over long time scales, and near-shot-noise-limited intensity fluctuations. Analysis of the phonon sidebands shows weak vibronic coupling and ZPL-dominated emission, with Debye-Waller factors approaching 50%. Control experiments together with elemental mapping support oxygen incorporation as a necessary ingredient in activating the NIR emitter population, while first-principles calculations identify ONVN and ONVNH as the leading defect candidates. These results establish a high-performance NIR quantum-emitter platform in hBN for free-space quantum networking and future integrated quantum-photonic architectures.
PMID:
42389838
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 02 Jul 2026.
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