Top-down fabrication of plasmonic nanostructures for deterministic coupling to single quantum emitters

TL;DR

This paper presents a deterministic top-down fabrication method for integrating plasmonic nanostructures with single quantum emitters, enabling scalable and precise development of quantum photonic devices.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable, deterministic top-down fabrication technique for metal nanostructures on preselected quantum emitters, improving device reproducibility.

Findings

Observed emitter lifetime reduction consistent with previous non-deterministic methods

Demonstrated scalable fabrication of metal wires on nitrogen vacancy centers

Validated the potential of top-down methods for quantum emitter-plasmonic device integration

Abstract

Metal nanostructures can be used to harvest and guide the emission of single photon emitters on-chip via surface plasmon polaritons. In order to develop and characterize photonic devices based on emitter-plasmon hybrid structures a deterministic and scalable fabrication method for such structures is desirable. Here we demonstrate deterministic and scalable top-down fabrication of metal wires onto preselected nitrogen vacancy centers in nanodiamonds using clean room nano-fabrication methods. We observe a life-time reduction of the emitter emission that is consistent with earlier proof-of-principle experiments that used non-deterministic fabrication methods. This result indicates that top-down fabrication is a promising technique for processing future devices featuring single photon emitters and plasmonic nanostructures.