Colour centres in hexagonal boron nitride as memory assisted single photon sources

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Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), a wide bandgap, two-dimensional material can host a number of colour centers that act as single photon sources. Remarkably, the emission linewidth for single defects is narrow bandwidth, even at room temperature and beyond. In the last two years, the potential for lifetime limited linewidths has been reported. This offers the tantalizing prospect of building room temperature coherent quantum light sources, versus incoherent single photon sources. A classical analogy would be a transition from light bulb to laser. Furthermore, there are a number of recent reports of microsecond scale spin coherence times for ensembles in hBN at room temperature, providing a memory resource for potential error correction.The main challenge is achieving optical and spin coherence on the single defect level. This project will study the optical coherence properties of single defects in hBN, which when combined with recent successes in optically detected magnetic resonance experiments probing the spin coherence, will better establish the potential of this material system for applications to quantum photonics. The project will incorporate the spin defects into tuneable microcavities to enhance emission and ultimately achieving indistinguishable photons.