This project is centered around exploring novel solid-state materials and spin-qubits of color centers and defects in wide bandgap semiconductors for quantum information science, nanoscale metrology, and biosensing. Although significant progress has been achieved in understanding and utilizing the quantum properties of optically addressable nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers in diamond for quantum sensing and quantum computing, further advances are severely limited by difficulties in achieving their exact placement, light collection due to the high refractive index of diamond, large scale integration, and low qubit yield. Superior solid-state host materials such as 3D wide bandgap (WBG) semiconductors and recently discovered atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals materials with varieties of optically addressable color centers are very attractive alternatives to advance this research. We are interested to explore two systems:
Defects in WBG semiconductors, eg. ZnO, SiC, GaN, AIN and GaN. This part of the project aims to: i) measure the spin coherence life times of the defects, ii) explore single photon emission for integration to optoelectronic devices, iii) develop new characterization techniques tailored to varieties of excitations (optical, electrical, magnetic, thermal, strain, etc.) and sensing techniques.
Defects in 2D materials. Our research goals of this part include: i) characterize selective quantum grade quality novel host 2D materials (e.g. h-BN, WSe2, MoS2) with desired color centers exhibiting unique quantum properties, ii) Elucidate the physical mechanisms responsible for the observed novel quantum properties (e.g. spin coherence) and governing composition- processing defect- property relationships, iii) Explore innovative device designs based on the qubits novel properties.
To perform such studies we are building custom cryogenic (3 - 350 K) confocal fluorescence microscopes with continuum laser excitations, integrated to high resolution spectrometers, single-photon counting modules, and optically detected magnetic resonance setups. We will use the second-order photon correlation function mapping to characterize the fluorescence lifetimes, and check their integration to optical metamaterials (plasmonic nanostructures.