Single-Photon Emitters in Silicon Nitride forScalable Quantum Photonics*

In this work, we demonstrated the generation of intrinsic single-photon emitters in SiN material via novel growth and annealing processes. Specifically, we have grown the SiN films by high-density plasma chemical vapor deposition under growth conditions providing a low auto-fluorescence SiN, while the subsequent rapid thermal annealing resulted in the generation of single-photon emitters. We investigated the material, structural, optical, and quantum properties of such emitters. They were found to be bright, stable, linearly polarized, and high-purity sources of single photons at room temperature. The utilization of quantum emitters natively embedded in SiN has the potential to mitigate the typical low coupling efficiency of emission into photonic components common in hybrid systems. Monolithically embedded emitters also avoid the difficulty of scaling fabrication of hybrid integrated platforms for industrial-scale quantum applications. We also studied the integration of SiN quantum emitters with on-chip photonic circuitry to explore the potential for these new sources for quantum communication, quantum photonic computational algorithms, and quantum simulation. We fabricated SiN waveguides with integrated emitters coupled off-chip with grating couplers. We characterized the structure by performing photon intensity correlation measurements of emitters coupled to waveguides. The antibunched emission from a waveguide-coupled emitter has been successfully measured. The improvement of the SiN emitter-waveguide system requires further studies of the interplay between growth conditions, auto-fluorescence, and refractive index of SiN.