. These atomic-scale defects in semiconductor materials can emit single photons of fixed wavelength or color and allow photons to interact with electron spin properties in controlled ways.
A team of researchers has recently demonstrated a more effective technique for creating quantum emitters using pulsed ion beams, deepening our understanding of howare formed. The work was led by Department of Energy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers Thomas Schenkel, Liang Tan, and Boubacar Kanté who is also an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.
In this work, the team targeted the fabrication of a specific type of color center in silicon comprising two substitutional carbon atoms and a slightly dislodged silicon atom. The conventional method of producing the defects is to hit the silicon with a continuous beam of high-energy ions; however, the researchers discovered that a pulsed ion beam is significantly more efficient, producing many more of the desired color centers.
"We were surprised to find these defects can be more easily generated with pulsed ion beams," said Wei Liu, a postdoctoral scholar in ATAP and first author of the publication."Right now, industry and academia mainly use continuous beams, but we've demonstrated a more efficient approach." The researchers believe that the transient excitations created by the pulsed beam, where the temperature and system energetics change rapidly, are key to the more efficient color center formation, which they established through an earlier study using pulsed