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  • Open Access

Hybrid Nanocavity Resonant Enhancement of Color Center Emission in Diamond

Paul E. Barclay*, Kai-Mei C. Fu†, Charles Santori, Andrei Faraon, and Raymond G. Beausoleil

  • Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, 1501 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, California 94304, USA

  • *Present address: Institute for Quantum Information Science, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, T2N 1N3, Canada; NRC-National Institute for Nanotechnology, 11421 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB T6G 2M9, Canada. pbarclay@ucalgary.ca
  • †Present address: Department of Physics, University of Washington, 4014 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105, USA.
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Phys. Rev. X 1, 011007 – Published 7 September, 2011

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.1.011007

Abstract

Resonantly enhanced emission from the zero-phonon line of a diamond nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in single crystal diamond is demonstrated experimentally using a hybrid whispering gallery mode nanocavity. A 900 nm diameter ring nanocavity formed from gallium phosphide, whose sidewalls extend into a diamond substrate, is tuned onto resonance at a low temperature with the zero-phonon line of a negatively charged NV center implanted near the diamond surface. When the nanocavity is on resonance, the zero-phonon line intensity is enhanced by approximately an order of magnitude, and the spontaneous emission lifetime of the NV is reduced by as much as 18%, corresponding to a 6.3X enhancement of emission in the zero photon line.

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Popular Summary

In photonics-based networks for quantum information processing, photons serve as flying qubits, capable of carrying quantum information and mediating communication between stationary qubits. For such applications, single photons emitted from the nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond—an atomic-scale defect consisting of a substitutional nitrogen atom adjacent to a carbon vacancy—hold particular promise. One of the challenges of implementing quantum networks with these defects is to enhance their photon emission at preferential wavelengths, another is to direct the emitted photons into on-chip components that can be integrated into photonic circuits. In this experimental paper, we present a semiconductor-diamond hybrid nanophotonic structure that addresses both of these challenges.

In our hybrid structure, a semiconductor (gallium phosphide) ring, with an outer diameter just below 1 μm, is fabricated on top of a similarly sized ring machined from a single crystal diamond chip. The semiconductor ring, which serves as an optical cavity, traps photons within a wavelength-scale volume and increases the time and the strength of the interactions between photons and nitrogen-vacancy centers located in the diamond. The result is then a factor-of-6 enhancement of the emission of desired wavelengths from a single nitrogen-vacancy center. This degree of enhancement is similar to what has been achieved in another diamond ring structure of a different construction that requires a more demanding fabrication process. The new structure not only allows for flexibility in design that can take advantage of the properties of the semiconductor material, but also provides a chip-based photonics platform well suited for collecting and routing light between distant centers. We envision that photonic circuits consisting of elements such as these hybrid nanocavities will be useful for future quantum information processing applications, ultralow power optical information processing and switching, and on-chip, high-resolution magnetometry.

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Phys. Rev. X 1, 011007– Published 7 September, 2011
  • Received 20 June 2011
Article part of CHORUS
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This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

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