TOWARDS SCALABLE QUANTUM PHOTONIC SYSTEMS:INTRINSIC SINGLE-PHOTON EMITTERS IN SILICONNITRIDE/OXIDE

This thesis is about the exciting discovery of a new kind of single photon emitter that
is suspected to occur at the interface of silicon nitride SixNy and silicon dioxide SiO2 after
being rapidly annealed. Since SixNy is one of the most developed platforms for integrated
photonics the discovery of a native emitter in this platform opened up the possibility for
seamless integration of these single photon emitters with photonic circuitry for the first
time. This seamless integration was demonstrated as is shown in Chapter 3 by creating the
emitters and then patterning the SixNy layer into a waveguide. This work demonstrated for
the first time the coupling of such single photon emitters with on-chip integrated photonics.
However, the integration approach demonstrated was based on the stochastic integration of
emitters which limits the efficiency of the devices and the possible types of devices that can
be designed. This is why the next stage of research focused on the development of a site-
controlled process for creating these single photon emitters. Remarkably, it was found that
if the SixNy and SiO2 are nanostructured into nanopillars and then annealed then a single
photon emitter forms over 65% of the time within the nanopillar! Due to the lithography
defined nature of this process for creating the single photon emitters the first multi-mask
integration process was also developed and demonstrated. This fabrication process was used
to demonstrate the integration of several thousand single photon emitters with complex
integrated photonic structures such as topology optimized couplers. These developments
has generated a great deal of excitement due to the inherent scalability of the approach and
it’s obvious applications for the development of very large scale integrated (VLSI) on-chip
quantum photonic systems.