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Identifying the atomic origin of the well-recognized 2 eV single-photon emitters in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) has remained a long debate and important for controllable single-photon emission generation. Here, the authors investigate the static and dynamic properties of carbon trimers from first-principles with many-body interactions. Based on the calculated results, they propose C₂C₍ to be a promising candidate, which has Zero-Phonon Line, Huang-Rhys factor, photoluminescence lifetime and lineshape all in agreement with the current experimental observations. The near-infrared emission from C₂C₍ is suggested to be another identifier for experimental verification of the nature of single-photon emitters in hBN.
Li et al. (Fri,) studied this question.