Revisiting room-temperature 1.54 μιη photoluminescence of ErOx centers in silicon at extremely low concentration

Luminescence of erbium in silicon has been intensively explored in the past in the high power emission regime, but its employment for manufacturability of active components for silicon photonics proved unfeasible. We explore the room-temperature photoluminescence (PL) at the telecomm wavelength of very low implantation doses of ErO
_x
in Si for accessing few photon regime towards single photon emission. We achieve countable photon regime and we assess the lower-bound number of detectable emission centers by micron scale implanted dots, whose emission is collected by an inverted confocal microscope.