Abstract

Diamond possesses remarkable physical and chemical properties, and in many ways is the ultimate engineering material. For example, it is transparent from the ultra-violet to infrared, has a high refractive index (n = 2.4), strong optical nonlinearity (Kerr and Raman) and a wide variety of light-emitting defects. These properties make diamond a highly desirable material for many applications, including those in quantum and nonlinear photonics, high power optics and optomechanics. In my talk, I will review advances in nanotechnology that have enabled fabrication of nanoscale optical devices and chip-scale systems in diamond. One example is diamond-on-insulator platform that enables realization of ultra-high quality factor optical cavities (Q>1e6) [1,2]. Using these devices, microresonator based frequency combs [2] and Raman lasers have been demonstrated [3]. Another important application of diamond is in the field of quantum information science and technology. At the heart of these applications are diamond’s luminescent defects—color centers—and the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) and silicon-vacancy (SiV) color center in particular. These atomic systems in the solid-state possesses all the essential elements for quantum technology, including storage, logic, and communication of quantum information. I will summarize our work on high-Q and small mode volume photonic crystal nanobeam cavities fabricated in bulk diamond substrates using novel angled-etching technique [4,5]. Recent efforts aimed at coupling of these devices to NV and SiV color centers will be presented [6,7]. Finally, our efforts towards achieving strong spin-strain interaction between color centers embedded inside diamond NEMS [8,9] and optomechanical crystals [10] will be reviewed.

[1] B. J. M. Hausmann, et al, “Integrated diamond networks for quantum nanophotonics”, Nano Letters, 12, 1578 (2012) [2] B. J. M. Hausmann et al, “Diamond nonlinear photonics”, Nature Photonics, 8, 369 (2014) [3] P. Latawiec et al, “On-Chip diamond Raman laser” Optica, 2, 924 (2015) [4] M. J. Burek, et al, “Free-standing mechanical and photonic nanostructures in single-crystal diamond”, Nano Lett., 12, 6084 (2012) [5] M. J. Burek, et al, “High-Q optical nanocavities in bulk single-crystal diamond”, Nat. Comm., 5, 5718 (2014) [6] B. J. M. Hausmann, et al, “Coupling of NV centers to photonic crystal nanobeams in diamond”, Nano letters, 13, 5791-5796 (2013) [7] A. Sipahigil et al, “Quantum optical switch controlled by a color center in a diamond nanocavity”, under review (2016) [8] Y. I. Sohn et al, “Dynamic actuation of single-crystal diamond nanobeams”, Appl. Phys. Lett. 107, 243106 (2015) [9] S. Meesala et al, “Enhanced strain coupling of nitrogen vacancy spins to nanoscale diamond cantilevers”, arXiv: 1511.01548 [10] M. J. Burek et al, “ Diamond optomechanical crystals”, arXiv: 1512.04166