Fundamentally secure quantum cryptography has still not seen widespread application owing to the difficulty of generating single photons on demand. Semiconductor quantum-dot structures have recently shown great promise as practical single-photon sources, and devices with integrated optical cavities and electrical-carrier injection have already been demonstrated. However, a significant obstacle for the application of commonly used III-V quantum dots to quantum-information-processing schemes is the requirement of liquid-helium cryogenic temperatures. Epitaxially grown gallium nitride quantum dots embedded in aluminium nitride have the potential for operation at much higher temperatures. Here, we report triggered single-photon emission from gallium nitride quantum dots at temperatures up to 200 K, a temperature easily reachable with thermo-electric cooling. Gallium nitride quantum dots also open a new wavelength region in the blue and near-ultraviolet portions of the spectrum for single-photon sources.

Size-dependent radiative decay time of excitons in GaN/AlN self-assembled quantum dots is reported. Two samples having different average size of quantum dots (QDs) have been investigated at the temperature of 3.5 K. The measurement has revealed that larger-QD sample shows longer photoluminescence (PL) decay time and smaller emission energy than smaller one. The dependence of radiative decay time of the samples on emission energy smoothly connects with each other reflecting the size distribution. The radiative decay time strongly increases by almost three orders magnitude, reaching microseconds, upon increasing the size of QDs. The increase of PL decay time with increasing the size of QDs is attributed to the reduction of oscillator-strength due to the strong built-in electric field in the GaN/AlN heterostructures.

We present measurements of the second-order coherence function on emission from single GaN quantum dots. In some cases a large degree of photon antibunching is observed, demonstrating isolation of a single quantum system. For a selected quantum dot, we study the dependence of photon antibunching on excitation power and temperature. Using pulsed excitation, we demonstrate an ultraviolet triggered single-photon source operating at a wavelength of 358 nm.Comment: 3 pages, 4 figure