CEAT professors engineering color centers in hexagonal boron nitride

CEAT professors engineering color centers in hexagonal boron nitride

Thursday, September 12, 2024

Media Contact: Desa James | Communications Coordinator | 405 744 2669 | [email protected]

Dr. Ritesh Sachan, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Dr. Don Lucca, regents professor of MAE, have received a National Science Foundation grant for their project entitled "Manufacturing of Color Centers in Hexagonal Boron Nitride for Quantum Applications."

This project aims to create color centers in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) that can act as single photon emitters. To do so, their research will attempt to make reproducible material with specific defects, known as color centers, which can emit a single photon of light.

"NSF primarily funds basic research," Lucca said. "The use of Dr. Sachan's manufacturing technique to attempt to create color centers in hexagonal boron nitride is very appropriate for this type of funding."

Dr. LuccaDr. Sachan

The hexagonal boron nitride used in this research is a sheet of atoms that form in a single layer.

"To create the material, amorphous BN will first be created by pulsed laser deposition, and then nanosecond pulsed laser irradiation will be used to convert the a-BN to hBN," Sachan said.

A color center is formed in the material when a single atom is removed at a lattice site, creating a specific defect. To test if the desired defect has been created, Sachan will use aberration-corrected electron microscopy to examine the material at the atomic level.

Subsequently, the hBN with the defects will be analyzed in Lucca's lab to further examine whether the color centers perform as single photon emitters using photoluminescence spectroscopy. In this technique, the defects can be excited to emit single color light by irradiating with a Nd:YAG laser.

"These single photo emissions are the building blocks of quantum computing which have the potential to enable significant advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, cybersecurity, new materials development and improvement of weather forecasting," Sachan said.

The PIs will also collaborate with scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

One objective of the research is to reproducibly create the same defect to control what color light is being produced. The challenge is addressing the scalability and reliability of creating sheets of material that can be reproduced through the same processing conditions each time.

Atomic-level image of hBN produced using the laser-based methodology.

Overall, this award will support fundamental research to provide needed knowledge for manufacturing these unique materials. The results from this research will benefit the US economy and society.

The integrated educational program of the project will disseminate the research activities to a broad community of students and teachers at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels. These initiatives also aim to increase the skilled workforce of engineers with improved participation from underrepresented American populations.

Learn more about Sachan's research here and Lucca's research here.

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