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arXiv · 2512.16197

High-Performance Near-Infrared Quantum Emission from Color Centers in hBN

Abstract

Color centers hosted in hexagonal boron nitride have emerged as a highly promising platform for single-photon emission and spin-photon technologies relevant to quantum communication and quantum networking. As a wide-bandgap van der Waals material, hBN can host optically active quantum defects across a broad spectral range. Here, we demonstrate a simple and scalable oxygen-plasma process that reproducibly creates single quantum emitters in hBN with blinking-free zero-phonon lines spanning the near-infrared from 700 up to 971 nm. These emitters combine MHz-level brightness, single-photon purity up to 99.9\%, and ultranarrow cryogenic linewidths down to 2.7~GHz under quasi-resonant excitation, placing them in a particularly attractive regime for quantum photonics. Photostability measurements further reveal resistance to photobleaching, sub-nm spectral stability over long timescales, and near-shot-noise-limited intensity fluctuations. Analysis of the phonon sidebands shows weak vibronic coupling and ZPL-dominated emission, with Debye--Waller factors approaching 50\%. Control experiments together with EDS elemental mapping support oxygen incorporation as a necessary ingredient in activating the NIR emitter population, while first-principles calculations identify O$_N$V$_N$ and O$_N$V$_N$H as the leading defect candidates. These results establish a high-performance NIR quantum-emitter platform in hBN for free-space quantum networking and future integrated quantum-photonic architectures.

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BibTeXRIS

Sean Doan, Sahil D. Patel, Yilin Chen, Jordan A. Gusdorff. Mark E. Turiansky, Luis Villagomez, Luka Jevremovic, Nicholas Lewis, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Lee C. Bassett, Chris Van de Walle, Galan Moody. 2025-12-18. High-Performance Near-Infrared Quantum Emission from Color Centers in hBN. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16197

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