Enhancement of single-photon sources with metamaterials

Scientists are looking for new, breakthrough solutions that can greatly advance computing and networking systems. These solutions will involve quantum properties of matter and light as promised by the ongoing experimental and theoretical work in the areas of quantum computation and communication. Quantum photonics is destined to play a central role in the development of such technologies due to the high transmission capacity and outstanding low-noise properties of photonic information channels. Among the vital problems to be solved in this direction, are efficient generation and collection of single photons. One approach to tackle these problems is based on engineering emission properties of available single-photon sources using metamaterials. Metamaterials are artificially engineered structures with sub-wavelength features whose optical properties go beyond the limitations of conventional materials. As promising single-photon sources, we have chosen nitrogen-vacancy (NV) color centers in diamond, which are capable to operate stably in a single-photon regime at room temperature in a solid state environment. In this chapter, we report both theoretical and experimental studies of the radiation from a nanodiamond single NV center placed near a hyperbolic metamaterial (HMM). In particular, we derive the reduction of excited-state lifetime and the enhancement of collected single-photon emission rate and compare them with the experimental observations. These results could be of great impact for future integrated quantum sources, especially owing to a CMOS-compatible approach to HMM synthesis.