Single-photon emission from Ni-related color centers in CVD diamond

David Steinmetz, Elke Neu, Christian Hepp, Roland Albrecht, Wolfgang Bolse, Jan Meijer, Detlef Rogalla, Christoph Becher

Published 2010-03-17, updated 2010-06-09Version 4

Color centers in diamond are very promising candidates among the possible realizations for practical single-photon sources because of their long-time stable emission at room temperature. The popular nitrogen-vacancy center shows single-photon emission, but within a large, phonon-broadened spectrum (~100nm), which strongly limits its applicability for quantum communication. By contrast, Ni-related centers exhibit narrow emission lines at room temperature. We present investigations on single color centers consisting of Ni and Si created by ion implantation into single crystalline IIa diamond. We use systematic variations of ion doses between 10^8/cm^2 and 10^14/cm^2 and energies between 30keV and 1.8MeV. The Ni-related centers show emission in the near infrared spectral range (~770nm to 787nm) with a small line-width (~3nm FWHM). A measurement of the intensity correlation function proves single-photon emission. Saturation measurements yield a rather high saturation count rate of 77.9 kcounts/s. Polarization dependent measurements indicate the presence of two orthogonal dipoles.