Luca Marseglia Ph.D. Thesis

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Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Engineering,
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
Center for Quantum Photonics
University of Bristol, 2011

Dissertation: NANO-STRUCTURES COUPLED TO OPTICALLY ACTIVE DEFECTS IN DIAMOND.
Supervisors: Prof. John Rarity, Prof. Jeremy O'Brien.

Abstract


This project is concerned with single photon emitters in the solid state ( NV diamond), regarding the possibility of enhancing and controlling their emission via photonic crystal cavities. Photonic crystal cavities that strongly confine light are finding applications in many areas of physics and engineering. Critical for these applications is the realisation of a cavity with both high quality factor, Q, and small modal volume, V. The ratio Q/V determines the strength of the various cavity interactions, and an ultra-small cavity enables large-scale integration and single-mode operation for a broad range of wavelengths. The negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy NV colour centre in diamond has attracted a lot of interest because it can be optically addressed as a single quantum system and exhibits several important properties for quantum information science applications. The NV centre is perfectly photostable at room temperature, which is essential to make practical NV based single photon sources. Secondly, NV colour centres have a paramagnetic ground state whose spin can be optically polarised, optically read out and exhibits long coherence time even at room temperature.