Single-photon emission from localized excitons in an atomically thin semiconductor

By P. Tonndorf, R. Schmidt, R. Schneider, J. Kern, M. Buscema, G. Steele, A. Castellanos-Gómez, Herre S. J. van der Zant, S. M. Vasconcellos, R. Bratschitsch. 2015

410 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Single-photon sources are basic building blocks for quantum communications, processing, and metrology. Solid-state quantum emitters in semiconductors have the potential for robust and reliable generation of photons, and atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenides, such as MoS2, MoSe2, WS2, and WSe2, are a promising new class of two-dimensional semiconductors with a direct optical bandgap in the visible or near-IR. Here, we observe bright and stable single-photon emission from localized excitons in a monolayer of tungsten diselenide (WSe2). The emitters appear at the edges of the flakes and are linearly polarized. The spectral width of their emission is below 120 μeV in a freestanding WSe2 monolayer. Photoluminescence excitation spectroscopy reveals the excitonic nature of the emitters and provides evidence that these single excitons originate from free excitons trapped in local potential wells at the edges of the atomically thin flakes. We find that the emitters can also be deterministically created by scratching the WSe2 monolayer. Their excellent spectral stability implies that these localized single-photon emitters could find application in optoelectronics. Our results light the way to single exciton physics and quantum optics with atomically thin semiconductors.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9c40777bc71e2db3528e2273a873e24ad62fbc4b

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In Biomedical Engineering

1. Thomas Mueller
2. E. Malic
3. M. Potemski

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Dirk Englund
2. Thomas Mueller
3. M. Toth
4. E. Malic
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In Materials Chemistry

1. E. Malic
2. Dirk Englund
3. Thomas Mueller
4. M. Potemski
5. Igor Aharonovich

Citations in the corpus

• Compact Cavity-Enhanced Single-Photon Generation with Hexagonal Boron Nitride (2019, background): “[6] Philipp Tonndorf, Robert Schmidt, Robert Schneider, Johannes Kern, Michele Buscema, Gary A.”
• Optical properties of atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenides: observations and puzzles (2016, background): “The possibilities of creating them on demand by scratching the host monolayer with a microscope tip [70] or by strain engineering [119, 124, 125], as well as of filling them with charge carriers not only by optical but also by electrical means [120, 121, 123], look very promising from the point of v”
• Exciton physics and device application of two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide semiconductors (2018, background): “sufficient to overcome the trapping potential. Recently, it has been shown that these localized excitons are responsible for the observation of a pronounced single-photon emission from TMD monolayers [28, 29, 30, 31, 32] (Fig. 4b). The emitters often appear at the edges of the TMD samples and the sp”
• Material platforms for spin-based photonic quantum technologies (2018, background): “Panel b is adapted with permission from ReF.(188), Optical Society of America.”
• Quantum emission from hexagonal boron nitride monolayers (2015, background): “Single photon emission from two-dimensional materials has been reported [9-13], but only at cryogenic temperatures.”