Defect-related Optical and Electronic Properties of Ion-bombarded Hexagonal Boron Nitride

Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), a well-known 2-dimensional (2D) Van der Waals material, is emerging as an attractive platform for spin-based nanoscale applications, owing to its defect-related single-photon emitters (SPE) and their recently shown magneto-optical response. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of emitters displays possible spin-selective transitions, while their atomic structures remain elusive. We report on work towards circumventing some of these limitations by implanting rare-earth impurities. Cerium (Ce3+) bombarded hBN flakes show a distribution of isolated defects with broadened spectral features (centered at ~ 575 nm), good optical stability and strong magneto-optical response when excited via circularly polarized light. These results help pave the way towards defect engineering in low-dimensional materials for applications in opto-electronics, nanoscale sensing and quantum information processing.
A. L. Exarhos, D. A. Hopper, R. N. Patell, M. W. Doherty, L. C. Bassett, Nat. Comm. 10, 222 (2019)
A. Gottscholl, M. Kianinia, V. Soltamov, C. Bradac, C. Kasper, et. al., arXiv:1906.03774 (2019)