TECHNOLOGY LICENSING OPPORTUNITY: PinPoint Photon

Single Photon Generation Through Mechanical Deformation

Value Proposition

PinPoint Photon from Los Alamos National Laboratory gives quantum technology developers something they have long lacked: single photon sources that appear exactly where a designer places them. The approach relies on a wafer-scale film of an ultra-thin semiconductor shaped over precisely patterned tips. Light emitters can therefore be arranged in predictable arrays rather than found by chance. Early testing produced emitters at nearly nine out of 10 tip sites, with stable output for hours and excited-state lifetimes many times longer than those of unstrained material. Hardware teams in secure communications, photonic computing and quantum sensing gain a practical path from laboratory demonstrations to manufacturable chips.

Challenges

Many emerging quantum technologies need light that arrives one photon at a time. Examples include encryption keys that cannot be intercepted unnoticed and optical quantum computers. Ultra-thin 2D materials such as tungsten diselenide, tungsten disulfide and hexagonal boron nitride can produce such photons, but only from defects that form randomly, with no reliable way to control their location. Earlier attempts to guide emission by patterning the surface underneath the film could not separate the effect of mechanical strain from changes in the surrounding material, so the underlying physics stayed unclear. Most 2D quantum materials have also come from lab-scale methods such as peeling flakes off a crystal, which are unsuitable for large-scale device integration. Secure communication systems further need each site to hold no more than one emitter, a level of control that random defects cannot provide.

Problems Solved

PinPoint Photon replaces chance with design. A continuous few-layer tungsten diselenide film grown by gas-source chemical vapor deposition is transferred onto an array of ultra-sharp silicon dioxide tips. Each tip bends the film enough to localize emission at its apex. The film sits in a uniform silicon dioxide environment, so the team showed that mechanical bending alone creates the emission sites. That result answers the open scientific question left by earlier studies. The vapor deposition process is compatible with wafer-scale integration, and designers can set tip spacing so that each emitter remains individually accessible to optical systems. The resulting emitters showed no fine structure splitting, a key advance for quantum applications, along with spectral stability and roughly an order of magnitude longer lifetime than free excitons. Measured single photon purity reached about 70% at 3.8 K, with stable emission for up to eight hours.

Advantages

• Places quantum light sources at chosen locations instead of random ones
• High success rate, with emitters forming at 87% of tip sites in testing
• Built on a wafer-scale growth process suited to chip-style manufacturing
• Steady, long-lived light output that held stable for hours
• Clean emission without the line splitting that complicates many quantum emitters
• Potentially extends to other 2D materials emitting from the ultraviolet to the infrared

Market Applications

• Quantum Communications (secure key distribution, quantum networks, encrypted links)
• Quantum Computing (photonic processors, all-optical quantum circuits)
• Photonic Integrated Circuits and Semiconductors (on-chip light sources, optical signal generation)
• Sensing and Metrology (magnetic field sensors, temperature sensors)
• Scientific Instrumentation (quantum optics test sources, research tools for universities and laboratories)

 

TRL 3

U.S. Patent No. 12,237,428

LA-UR-26-29956

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