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Tunable phononic coupling in excitonic quantum emitters

Nature Nanotechnology volume 18, pages 1020–1026 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Engineering the coupling between fundamental quantum excitations is at the heart of quantum science and technologies. An outstanding case is the creation of quantum light sources in which coupling between single photons and phonons can be controlled and harnessed to enable quantum information transduction. Here we report the deterministic creation of quantum emitters featuring highly tunable coupling between excitons and phonons. The quantum emitters are formed in strain-induced quantum dots created in homobilayer WSe2. The colocalization of quantum-confined interlayer excitons and terahertz interlayer breathing-mode phonons, which directly modulates the exciton energy, leads to a uniquely strong phonon coupling to single-photon emission, with a Huang–Rhys factor reaching up to 6.3. The single-photon spectrum of interlayer exciton emission features a single-photon purity >83% and multiple phonon replicas, each heralding the creation of a phonon Fock state in the quantum emitter. Due to the vertical dipole moment of the interlayer exciton, the phonon–photon interaction is electrically tunable to be higher than the exciton and phonon decoherence rate, and hence promises to reach the strong-coupling regime. Our result demonstrates a solid-state quantum excitonic–optomechanical system at the atomic interface of the WSe2 bilayer that emits flying photonic qubits coupled with stationary phonons, which could be exploited for quantum transduction and interconnection.

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Fig. 1: Strain-engineered 2D QEs.
Fig. 2: Tunable 2D QEs.
Fig. 3: Single-phonon emission lines.
Fig. 4: Strong and tunable single phonon–exciton coupling.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF award number EFMA 1741656, ECCS-2006103, and NSF DMR-1719797). Part of this work was conducted at the Washington Nanofabrication Facility/Molecular Analysis Facility, a National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI) site at the University of Washington with partial support from the NSF via awards NNCI-1542101 and NNCI-2025489. A.R. received funding from NSF award DGE-2140004.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Adina Ripin, Srivatsa Chakravarthi, Minhao He, Xiaodong Xu, Kai-Mei Fu & Mo Li

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Ruoming Peng, Kai-Mei Fu & Mo Li

  3. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Xiaowei Zhang, Xiaodong Xu & Ting Cao

  4. Physical Sciences Division, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA

    Kai-Mei Fu

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Contributions

A.R., R.P. and M.L. conceived the research. A.R. and R.P. fabricated the devices and performed the measurements. X.Z. and T.C. performed the theoretical analysis. S.C., K.F., M.H. and X.X. assisted with single-photon autocorrelation measurements. A.R. analysed the data. A.R., R.P., T.C. and M.L. co-wrote the paper with contributions from all authors.

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Correspondence to Ruoming Peng or Mo Li.

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Nature Nanotechnology thanks Donghai Li and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Ripin, A., Peng, R., Zhang, X. et al. Tunable phononic coupling in excitonic quantum emitters. Nat. Nanotechnol. 18, 1020–1026 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-023-01410-6

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