All-dry pick-up and transfer method for quantum emitter arrays in hexagonal boron nitride

TL;DR

This paper presents an all-dry, polymer stamp-assisted transfer method for quantum emitters in hexagonal boron nitride, achieving high success rate and preserving emitter properties, thus enabling scalable integration for quantum technologies.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel dry transfer technique that improves scalability and maintains emitter characteristics, addressing key challenges in integrating quantum emitters into various platforms.

Findings

46% improvement in $g^{(2)}(0)$ after transfer

81.8% success rate in preserving emitters

Minimal change in lifetime, spectrum, and stability

Abstract

Single photon emitters in hexagonal boron nitride are based on fluorescent point-like defects. These defects typically have exceptional photophysical properties and therefore been the focus of extensive research due to their potential to advance photonic quantum technologies. However, achieving scalable integration of these emitters to arbitrary platforms with high yield while retaining their characteristics remains a significant challenge, particularly when the target substrate is not compatible with the fabrication method. In this work, we introduce an all-dry transfer method aimed at addressing these challenges with improved effectiveness compared to existing techniques. This polymer stamp-assisted transfer method maintains high output and preserves the fundamental characteristics of the emitters while eliminating wet chemical processes. A comprehensive post-transfer characterization verified not only the maintenance of the defining characteristic of a single photon emitter, the second-order correlation function $g^{(2)}(0)$, but also showed improvement by about 46%. In contrast, the lifetime, emission spectrum, and the photostability showed only negligible change, demonstrating that the characteristics of the emitters were retained during the transfer process. This transfer technique has success rate of 81.8%, determined by the proportion of single photon emitters that retain their optical and preserve physical structure post-transfer. This high success rate shows the potential to scale the integration of single photon emitters across diverse platforms. We expect that this process contributes to the applications of boron nitride defects in quantum technologies.