Close-to-Atom Scale Laser Manufacturing for 30-Color Turn-key Single-Photon Emitters

Abstract Atomic and close-to-atom scale manufacturing is now considered an avenue toward single-photon emitters, single-electron transistors, single-atom memory, and quantum-bit devices for future communication, computation, and sensing applications. Laser manufacturing is outstanding to this end for ease of beam manipulation and batch production, and no requirement for photomasks. It is, however, suffering from optical diffraction limit and lacks atomic and close-to-atom scale precision. Herein, we circumvent this limitation by exploiting a threshold tracing-and-lock-in method, whereby the 2-order gap between atomic point defect complexes and optical diffraction limit is surpassed. As a result, bright (up to 10 Mcounts s − 1 ) single-photon color centers are deterministically created from few-layer hBN with feature size of less than 5 nm and a near-unity yield. Around 94% of them emit monochromatically at around 30 individual wavelengths from 500 nm to 800 nm. A turn-key monochromic single-photon emitter of demanded color is attained by integrating it with 5-V blue laser diodes.