Single photon emission from top-down etched III-nitride quantum dots

Nanotechnology. 2020 Mar 27;31(13):13LT01. doi: 10.1088/1361-6528/ab6477. Epub 2019 Dec 20.

Abstract

We report the single photon emission properties of III-nitride quantum dots (QDs) fabricated by electrochemical etching method from an epitaxial wafer. Through such top-down fabrication, QDs with diameters of sub-10 nm are obtained, embedded in GaN nanoneedles. Owing to the size induced quantum confinement effect, the photoluminescence of the QDs exhibits a 3.35 nm blueshift compared with that of the epitaxial wafer. At low temperature, a second order correlation value down to 0.123 is observed, indicating a high-purity single photon emission. Our QDs manifest single photon emission at a temperature up to 130 K with a high degree of polarization of 0.69, comparable to those QDs synthesized by epitaxial growth. Our work demonstrates single photon emission are viable in top-down QDs by electrochemical etching III-nitride wafers.