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

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