Single artificial atoms in silicon emitting at telecom wavelengths

By W. Redjem, A. Durand, T. Herzig, A. Benali, S. Pezzagna, J. Meijer, A. Kuznetsov, H. Nguyen, S. Cueff, J. Gérard and 8 more. Nature Electronics, 2020

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Given its potential for integration and scalability, silicon is likely to be a key platform for large-scale quantum technologies. Individual electron-encoded artificial atoms, formed by either impurities or quantum dots, have emerged as a promising solution for silicon-based integrated quantum circuits. However, single qubits featuring an optical interface, which is needed for long-distance exchange of information, have not yet been isolated in silicon. Here we report the isolation of single optically active point defects in a commercial silicon-on-insulator wafer implanted with carbon atoms. These artificial atoms exhibit a bright, linearly polarized single-photon emission with a quantum efficiency of the order of unity. This single-photon emission occurs at telecom wavelengths suitable for long-distance propagation in optical fibres. Our results show that silicon can accommodate single isolated optical point defects like in wide-bandgap semiconductors, despite a small bandgap (1.1 eV) that is unfavourable for such observations. Carbon-related point defects can be isolated in a commercial silicon-on-insulator wafer, acting as artificial atoms that provide efficient polarized single-photon emission at wavelengths suitable for long-distance propagation in optical fibres.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/11c47442d469d763b694e50ddb2e8b7fefa523b3

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In Artificial Intelligence

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

2022 Roadmap on integrated quantum photonics (2021, background): “Moreover, Ta2O5 can host rare-earth ions, including erbium [5], which enables use as a gain medium, thus providing optical signal amplification and lasing capabilities on-chip.”