Individual color centers in diamond are promising for near-term quantum technologies including quantum key distribution and metrology. Here we show fabrication of a new color center which has photophysical properties surpassing those of the two main-stay centers, namely the nitrogen vacancy and NE8 centers. The new center is fabricated using focused ion beam implantation of nickel into isolated chemical vapor deposited diamond micro-crystals. Room temperature photoluminescence studies reveal a narrow emission in the near infrared region centered at 768 nm with a lifetime as short as 2 ns. Its focused ion beam compatibility opens the prospect to fabrication with nanometer resolution and realization of integrated quantum photonic devices. Preliminary investigations suggest that this center arises from an as-yet uncharacterized nickel-silicon complex.
@article{arxiv.0902.3051,
title = {A new, enhanced diamond single photon emitter in the near infra-red},
author = {Igor Aharonovich and Chunyuan Zhou and Alastair Stacey and Julius Orwa and David Simpson and Andrew D. Greentree and Francois Treussart and Jean Francois Roch and Steven Prawer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0902.3051},
year = {2009}
}