Efficient Optical Spectroscopy of Single Solid-State Quantum Emitters

Devices such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and lasers are typically based upon the accumulated emission from a large number of gas phase atoms, ions in solids, electron-hole pairs in semiconductors, or other fluorescence centers. In such macroscopic devices, the behavior of individual fluorescence centers is often hard to ascertain, but there are a number of benefits if this can be done. In addition to informing the design of traditional light-emitting devices, such single emitter spectroscopy is central to a number of important new technologies. For example, future information processing systems might take advantage of single emitters as single photon sources, as memory nodes in a quantum network, or as low power optical transistors, while metrology may benefit from the sensitivity of a single emitter to its local environment.