Phonon-induced multicolor correlations in hBN single-photon emitters

Abstract

Color centers in hexagonal boron nitride have shown enormous promise as single-photon sources, but a clear understanding of the electron-phonon interaction dynamics is critical to developing the material for quantum communications or quantum simulations. We demonstrate photon antibunching in the filtered auto- and cross-correlations ${g}_{lm}^{(2)}(\ensuremath{\tau})$ between zero-, one-, and two-phonon replicas of defect luminescence. With no background correction, we observe a single-photon purity of ${g}^{(2)}(0)=0.20$ in a phonon replica and cross-spectral correlations of ${g}_{lm}^{(2)}(0)=0.18$ between a phonon replica and the zero-phonon line. Moreover, we combine a violation of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality and a phenomenological model of the phonon-mediated emission cross section to distinguish a low quantum-efficiency defect from phonon replicas of a bright defect.