Bright high-purity quantum emitters in aluminium nitride integrated photonics

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the generation and integration of high-quality quantum emitters in aluminium nitride photonic circuits, achieving high photon count rates and antibunching, advancing scalable quantum photonic technologies.

Contribution

It reports the first direct integration of quantum emitters in aluminium nitride photonic circuits with record photon emission rates.

Findings

Off-chip count rate exceeding 6×10^4 cps for integrated QEs

Antibunching with g^(2)(0) ~ 0.05 in unpatterned samples

Photon count rates exceeding 8×10^5 cps in unpatterned samples

Abstract

Solid-state quantum emitters (QEs) are fundamental in photonic-based quantum information processing. There is strong interest to develop high-quality QEs in III-nitride semiconductors because of their sophisticated manufacturing driven by large and growing applications in optoelectronics, high voltage power transistors, and microwave amplifiers. Here, we report the generation and direct integration of QEs in an aluminium nitride-based photonic integrated circuit platform. For individual waveguide-integrated QEs, we measure an off-chip count rate exceeding $6 \times 10^{4}$ counts per second (cps) (saturation rate > $8.6 \times 10^{4}$ cps). In an unpatterned thin-film sample, we measure antibunching with $g^{(2)}(0) \sim 0.05$ and photon count rates exceeding $8 \times 10^{5}$ cps (saturation rate > $1 \times 10^{6}$ cps). Although spin and detailed optical linewidth measurements are left for future work, these results already show the potential for high-quality QEs monolithically integrated in a wide range of III-nitride device technologies that would enable new quantum device opportunities and industrial scalability.