Creation and nature of optical centres in diamond for single-photon emission—overview and critical remarks

A huge variety of optical colour centres can be found in diamond, emitting in its whole wide transparency range. Although several of these centres have been demonstrated as single-photon emitters, none of them meets all of the requirements of an ideal single-photon source. In this view, we discuss the properties of prominent optical centres, such as the nitrogen vacancy, the silicon vacancy or the so-called NE8 centre, as well as recently found centres ascribed to defects containing Ni, Si, Cr and Xe. Besides suitable intrinsic properties, it is necessary for practical applications that optical centres can be created artificially on demand. Of all known methods, only ion implantation allows for the most controlled creation of such defect centres. In this paper, we discuss how nanoscalability, that is, the nanometre placement and the deterministic creation of optical centres, can, could or cannot be achieved by the available ion implantation techniques. A fine analysis of individual optical centres is now possible, thanks to the recently developed subdiffraction optical microscopy methods.