Quantum Nanophotonics with Group IV defects in Diamond

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in quantum nanophotonics using group IV defects in diamond, emphasizing their advantages over NV centers and discussing engineering techniques and future prospects for scalable quantum photonic devices.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in group IV diamond defects and highlights new engineering methods and potential applications in quantum photonics.

Findings

Group IV defects exhibit stronger zero phonon line emission than NV centers.

These defects have inversion symmetry, beneficial for quantum applications.

Ion implantation enables scalable engineering of these diamond defects.

Abstract

Diamond photonics is an ever growing field of research driven by the prospects of harnessing diamond and its colour centres as suitable hardware for solid-state quantum applications. The last two decades have seen the field been shaped by the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centre both with breakthrough fundamental physics demonstrations and practical realizations. Recently however, an entire suite of other diamond defects has emerged. They are M V colour centres, where M indicates one of the elements in the IV column of the periodic table Si, Ge, Sn and Pb, and V indicates lattice vacancies, i.e. missing next-neighbour carbon atoms. These centres exhibit a much stronger emission into the zero phonon line then the NV centre, they display inversion symmetry, and can be engineered using ion implantation all attractive features for scalable quantum photonic architectures based on solid-state, single-photon sources. In this perspective, we highlight the leading techniques for engineering and characterizing these diamond defects, discuss the current state-of-the-art of group IV-based devices and provide an outlook of the future directions the field is taking towards the realisation of solid-state quantum photonics with diamond.