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A novel quantum light source located inside a nanowire makes it to the front cover of ACS Nano!
Quantum light sources based on single and entangled photons are nowadays attracting large interest in quantum technologies, such as secure communication and powerful information processing. While mature self-assembled planar quantum dots have shown extremely high single photon purity and brightness, they are hard to grow on the mainstream Silicon substrates with high quality. Growth on Silicon is instead possible for III-V nanowires, which are filamentary crystals that can be grown in a scalable and flexible way as trees in a forest.
In this work, scientists from the NANO-SPECTROSCOPY group at Sapienza, led by Prof. Marta De Luca, together with researchers from EPFL and University of Basel in Switzerland, the CNR in Trieste and the OPERA group in Sapienza, have achieved highly pure single photon emitters embedded in ultra-thin dilute nitrides nanowires grown on Silicon. The joint effort of the NANO-SPECTROSCOPY and the OPERA groups was boosted by the collaboration enabled by the PNRR NQSTI program.
The nanowires exhibit exceptional crystal quality, with a pure zincblende phase and a core-shell-shell structure hosting a quantum well tube of GaAsN with high N content (3%). Optical measurements unveiled the high purity of the single-photon emission, achieving the first demonstration of quantum light emission in GaAsN nanowires. The results represent a major step toward developing on-chip quantum light sources for future quantum photonic circuits compatible with Silicon.
You can read the full article here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.5c12139 and download the high-resolution cover of the ACS Nano journal here: https://pubs.acs.org/toc/ancac3/19/46.