Nanoscale positioning approaches for integrating single epitaxial quantum emitters with photonic nanostructures

TL;DR

This review discusses various nanoscale positioning techniques for integrating single quantum emitters with photonic structures, highlighting recent advances, device demonstrations, and future challenges in scalable quantum photonics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent nanoscale positioning methods and their application in quantum photonic device fabrication, emphasizing progress and remaining challenges.

Findings

Multiple positioning techniques enable deterministic integration of quantum emitters.

High-performance quantum photonic devices have been demonstrated using these methods.

Challenges remain in applying techniques across different material systems.

Abstract

Deterministically integrating single solid-state quantum emitters with photonic nanostructures serves as a key enabling resource in the context of photonic quantum technology. Due to the random spatial location of many widely-used solid-state quantum emitters, a number of positoning approaches for locating the quantum emitters before nanofabrication have been explored in the last decade. Here, we review the working principles of several nanoscale positioning methods and the most recent progress in this field, covering techniques including atomic force microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, confocal microscopy with \textit{in situ} lithography, and wide-field fluorescence imaging. A selection of representative device demonstrations with high-performance is presented, including high-quality single-photon sources, bright entangled-photon pairs, strongly-coupled cavity QED systems, and other emerging applications. The challenges in applying positioning techniques to different material systems and opportunities for using these approaches for realizing large-scale quantum photonic devices are discussed.