Organic Molecules as Origin of Visible-Range Single Photon Emission from Hexagonal Boron Nitride and Mica
Neumann M, Wei X, Morales-Inostroza L, Song S, Lee SG, Watanabe K, Taniguchi T, Götzinger S, Lee YH (2023)
Publication Type: Journal article
Publication year: 2023
Journal
Abstract
The discovery of room-temperature single-photon emitters (SPEs) hosted by two-dimensional hexagonal boron nitride (2D hBN) has sparked intense research interest. Although emitters in the vicinity of 2 eV have been studied extensively, their microscopic identity has remained elusive. The discussion of this class of SPEs has centered on point defects in the hBN crystal lattice, but none of the candidate defect structures have been able to capture the great heterogeneity in emitter properties that is observed experimentally. Employing a widely used sample preparation protocol but disentangling several confounding factors, we demonstrate conclusively that heterogeneous single-photon emission at ∼2 eV associated with hBN originates from organic molecules, presumably aromatic fluorophores. The appearance of those SPEs depends critically on the presence of organic processing residues during sample preparation, and emitters formed during heat treatment are not located within the hBN crystal as previously thought, but at the hBN/substrate interface. We further demonstrate that the same class of SPEs can be observed in a different 2D insulator, fluorophlogopite mica.
Authors with CRIS profile
Additional Organisation(s)
Involved external institutions
Institute for Basic Science
Korea, Republic of (KR)
National Institute of Materials Science (NIMS)
Japan (JP)
Max-Planck-Institut für die Physik des Lichts (MPL) / Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light
Germany (DE)
Korea, Republic of (KR)
National Institute of Materials Science (NIMS)
Japan (JP)
Max-Planck-Institut für die Physik des Lichts (MPL) / Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light
Germany (DE)
How to cite
APA:
Neumann, M., Wei, X., Morales-Inostroza, L., Song, S., Lee, S.G., Watanabe, K.,... Lee, Y.H. (2023). Organic Molecules as Origin of Visible-Range Single Photon Emission from Hexagonal Boron Nitride and Mica. ACS nano. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.3c02348
MLA:
Neumann, Michael, et al. "Organic Molecules as Origin of Visible-Range Single Photon Emission from Hexagonal Boron Nitride and Mica." ACS nano (2023).
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