Synergistic ion beam engineering of high-performance spin–photon interfaces in hexagonal boron nitride
Abstract
Deterministically coupling spin defects to optical microcavities is critical for scalable quantum sensing yet remains a fabrication bottleneck. Here, we demonstrate the deterministic integration of negatively charged boron vacancy (VB−) spin defects in hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) with circular Bragg grating microcavities using a dual-beam focused ion beam approach. While standard heavy-ion lithography often degrades emitter quality through lattice amorphization, we demonstrate that helium ion (He+) irradiation enables the surgical creation of VB− centers with preserved long-range crystalline order. By combining Ga+ ions milling for cavity definition with in situ He+ ion writing, we achieve sub-15 nm spatial alignment between the emitter and the cavity mode volume, eliminating registration errors inherent to overlay lithography. The fabricated device exhibits highly directional emission with a Purcell factor of 1.57, evidenced by a reduction in fluorescence lifetime. These photonic enhancements translate to high-fidelity capabilities in optically detected magnetic resonance spin readout, establishing this monolithic fabrication strategy as a robust pathway for scalable, high-sensitivity quantum sensing arrays.
Article Details
Journal Info
Applied Physics Letters
American Institute of Physics
Authors (13)
Yun-Tao Wu
State Key Laboratory of Luminescence Science and Technology, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences 1 , No. 3888 Dongnanhu Road, Changchun 130033,
Xu Guo
Peng-Tao Jing
State Key Laboratory of Luminescence Science and Technology, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences 1 , No. 3888 Dongnanhu Road, Changchun 130033,
Zhen Cheng
State Key Laboratory of Drug Research, Molecular Imaging Center
Ji-Lian Xu
State Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Information Acquisition and Protection Technology, Anhui University 3 , Hefei 230601,
Hai Xu
Department of Biological and Energy Chemical Engineering, China University of Petroleum (East China), 66 Changjiang West Road, Qingdao 266580, China
Li-Gong Zhang
State Key Laboratory of Luminescence Science and Technology, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences 1 , No. 3888 Dongnanhu Road, Changchun 130033,
Da Zhan
State Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Information Acquisition and Protection Technology, Anhui University 3 , Hefei 230601,
Jia-Xu Yan
State Key Laboratory of Luminescence Science and Technology, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences 1 , No. 3888 Dongnanhu Road, Changchun 130033,
Yang Bao
Hai Zhu
Lei Liu
De-Zhen Shen
State Key Laboratory of Opto-Electronic Information Acquisition and Protection Technology, Anhui University 3 , Hefei 230601,