Color centers hosted in hexagonal boron nitride have emerged as a highly promising platform for single-photon emission and spin-photon technologies relevant to quantum communication and quantum networking. As a wide-bandgap van der Waals material, hBN can host optically active quantum defects across a broad spectral range. Here, we demonstrate a simple and scalable oxygen-plasma process that reproducibly creates single quantum emitters in hBN with blinking-free zero-phonon lines spanning the near-infrared from 700 up to 971 nm. These emitters combine MHz-level brightness, single-photon purity up to 99.9\%, and ultranarrow cryogenic linewidths down to 2.7~GHz under quasi-resonant excitation, placing them in a particularly attractive regime for quantum photonics. Photostability measurements further reveal resistance to photobleaching, sub-nm spectral stability over long timescales, and near-shot-noise-limited intensity fluctuations. Analysis of the phonon sidebands shows weak vibronic coupling and ZPL-dominated emission, with Debye--Waller factors approaching 50\%. Control experiments together with EDS elemental mapping support oxygen incorporation as a necessary ingredient in activating the NIR emitter population, while first-principles calculations identify ONVN and ONVNH as the leading defect candidates. These results establish a high-performance NIR quantum-emitter platform in hBN for free-space quantum networking and future integrated quantum-photonic architectures.
@article{arxiv.2512.16197,
title = {High-Performance Near-Infrared Quantum Emission from Color Centers in hBN},
author = {Sean Doan and Sahil D. Patel and Yilin Chen and Jordan A. Gusdorff. Mark E. Turiansky and Luis Villagomez and Luka Jevremovic and Nicholas Lewis and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi and Lee C. Bassett and Chris Van de Walle and Galan Moody},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.16197},
year = {2026}
}