Investigation of photon emitters in rare-earth-implanted hexagonal boron nitride*

We report on work towards the engineering of rare-earth-based color centers in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), a well-known 2D Van der Waals material. 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. The potential atomic nature of these color centers and their optoelectronic properties are further studied by density functional theory calculations. These results help pave the way towards defect engineering in low-dimensional materials for applications in optoelectronic devices, nanoscale sensing and quantum information processing.

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