Photodynamics and Enhanced Photon Emission in Aluminum Nitride Quantum Emitters

Wide bandgap semiconductors often contain defects that exhibit luminesce at room temperature. While much attention has been given to vacancy-ion complexes in diamond, such as SiV and NV-, which possess internal spin-sub-levels useful for various applications like sensing external fields, hosting spin qubits, or generating single photons, the presence of intersystem crossing in their energy levels limits their saturated intensity. In contrast, point-like emitters in the commercially important $\mathrm{Al}_{\mathrm {{x}}} \mathrm{Ga}_{1-{\mathrm {x}}} \mathrm{~N}$ semiconductors have received much less scrutiny, but have been found in as-grown epilayers [1] and created using ion-implantation [2]. These emitters exhibit antibunched light emission at room temperature and it was recently shown that defects in GaN can also host single spin qubits amenable to optical detected magnetic resonance spectroscopy [3].