Enhanced Single Photon Emission from a Diamond-Silver Aperture

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a scalable method to enhance single photon emission from diamond NV centers using diamond-silver plasmonic structures, achieving significant emission rate improvements for quantum applications.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel scalable fabrication technique for coupling NV centers to plasmonic resonators, resulting in substantial emission rate enhancements.

Findings

Over six-fold increase in emission rate compared to bare structures

Up to 3.6 times reduction in radiative lifetime

Demonstrated deterministic coupling in multiple devices

Abstract

We have developed a scalable method for coupling single color centers in diamond to plasmonic resonators and demonstrated Purcell enhancement of the single photon emission rate of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers. Our structures consist of single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center-containing diamond nanoposts embedded in a thin silver film. We have utilized the strong plasmon resonances in the diamond-silver apertures to enhance the spontaneous emission of the enclosed dipole. The devices were realized by a combination of ion implantation and top-down nanofabrication techniques, which have enabled deterministic coupling between single NV centers and the plasmonic modes for multiple devices in parallel. The plasmon-enhanced NV centers exhibited over six-fold improvements in spontaneous emission rate in comparison to bare nanoposts and up to a factor of 3.6 in radiative lifetime reduction over bulk samples, with comparable increases in photon counts. The hybrid diamond-plasmon system presented here could provide a stable platform for the implementation of diamond-based quantum information processing and magnetometry schemes.