Controlling Quantum Emitters with Phonons Across a Factor of 20 Energy Gap

Surface phonon polaritons (SPhPs), quasi-particles resulting from the hybridization of mid-infrared radiation (MIR) and lattice vibrations, have shown to be a promising candidate for use as information carriers in classical and quantum information processing technologies. It is essential for the SPhPs to be able to interact with the quantum light emitters, which generate a stream of single photons carrying quantum information. While SPhPs are characterized with energies of the orders of 0.1 eV, the quantum emitters generate photons with the energies of 1-2 eV, making them impossible to couple. We hypothesized that this approximate factor of 20 gap in energy can be overcome in the 2D van der Waal material hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) which is known to support both propagation of SPhP and quantum emitters that strongly couple to the phonons that form SPhPs. As the initial step toward testing this hypothesis, here we are reporting two experiments:

1. Creating quantum emitters in hBN flakes through thermal annealing.

2. Demonstrating that quantum emitters created in hBN can couple to the phonons excited by the MIR radiation.