Pankaj Jha1,Hamidreza Akbari1,Souvik Biswas1,Claudio Parazzoli2,Barbara Capron2,Benjamin Koltenbah3,Harry Atwater1
California Institute of Technology1,North West Quantum Science2,The Boeing Company3
Pankaj Jha1,Hamidreza Akbari1,Souvik Biswas1,Claudio Parazzoli2,Barbara Capron2,Benjamin Koltenbah3,Harry Atwater1
California Institute of Technology1,North West Quantum Science2,The Boeing Company3
Single photon sources (SPSs) are one of the building blocks for quantum technologies, including optical quantum computing, quantum communications, and sensing and metrology [1]. Recently, color centers in hexagonal boron nitride (<i>h</i>BN) have emerged as a promising candidate for SPS at room temperature [2], which can be localized with nanometric precision [3] as well as exhibit near-lifetime and tunable quantum emission [4]. Here, we show that these <i>h</i>BN emitters can be used as a quantum module for photon addition quantum technology for enhanced sensing and imaging applications [5].<br/>In this work, we investigated emission characteristics of an <i>h</i>BN quantum emitter pumped off-resonantly with a 532 nm pulsed laser. We quantified the Mandel-Q parameter over several orders of magnitude of observation time scale by tagging every photon and applying temporal gating. We observed the transformation of sub-Poissonian statistics of intensity fluctuations measured over the shorter (tens of nanoseconds) times to super-Poissonian over the longer (tens of microseconds) times. Next, in addition to the pump laser, we triggered the excited quantum emitter quasi-resonantly with a very weak (at the level of single photons) tunable dye laser. De-excitation of the <i>h</i>BN quantum emitter can be triggered by the dye laser or occur spontaneously. Using the Hanbury Brown-Twiss setup, we measured two photon counts with and without the <i>h</i>BN quantum emitter. We compared the experimental results to those calculated using a light-emitter interaction model. Our experimental results may open the door to using <i>h</i>BN quantum emitters for probabilistic coherent amplification of weak optical and thermal signals for applications in sensing and imaging.<br/><b>References:</b><br/>[1] M. D. Eisaman <i>et al., Rev. Sci. Instrum. </i><b>82</b>, 071101 (2011).<br/>[2] T. T. Tran <i>et al.</i>, Nat. Nanotechnol. <b>11</b>, 31 (2016).<br/>[3] P. K. Jha <i>et al.</i>, Nanotechnology <b>33</b>, 015001 (2022).<br/>[4] H. Akbari <i>et al.,</i> <i>Lifetime limited and tunable quantum light emission in h-BN via electric field modulation </i>(in review 2022)<br/>[5] C. G. Parazzoli <i>et al., "Enhanced Thermal Images of Faint Objects via Photon Addition / Subtraction," </i>in Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics, OSA Technical Digest (online) (Optica Publishing Group, 2016), paper FTu3C.4<i>.</i>