Room-temperature single-photon emission from β-Ga2O3

Abstract Single photon emitters (SPEs) hosted by the wide bandgap semiconductors have the great potential to enable quantum applications at room temperature. Recently, many defect-based SPEs have been discovered in various wide bandgap materials, such as diamond, AlN, SiC, h-BN, GaN and ZnO. Beta-phase gallium oxide (β-Ga 2 O 3 ) is an emerging ultrawide bandgap semiconductor with promising electronic and optoelectronic properties, however, there has been no report on single-photon emission from β-Ga 2 O 3 to date. Herein, we present the demonstration of room-temperature photostable single-photon emission from β-Ga 2 O 3 . We find that the SPEs can be found in a variety of β-Ga 2 O 3 including homoepitaxial and heteroepitaxial β-Ga 2 O 3 films and commercially available β-Ga 2 O 3 wafers. The observed emitters have excellent photophysical characteristics including high purity, high brightness, and linear polarization. First-principles calculations predict that a localized neutral divacancy defect, generated by plasma treatment and activated by annealing, is responsible for the SPEs in β-Ga 2 O 3 . The high-performance room-temperature SPEs embedded in a technologically mature semiconductor are promising for on-chip scalable integrated devices and quantum technologies.