Abstract:Single quantum emitters (SQEs) are at the heart of quantum optics 1 We assign this fine structure to two excitonic eigen-modes whose degeneracy is lifted by a large ~0.71 meV coupling, likely due to the electron-hole exchange interaction in presence of anisotropy 8 . Magneto-optical measurements also reveal an exciton g-factor of ~8.7, several times larger than that of delocalized valley excitons 9-12 . In addition to their fundamental importance, establishing new SQEs in 2D quantum materials could give rise to practical advantages in quantum information processing, such as efficient photon extraction and high integratability and scalability. Here, we report the first observation of photon antibunching from localized SQEs in tungsten-diselenide (WSe2) monolayers. WSe2 monolayers are grown on top of a 300 nm SiO2 on silicon substrate by physical vapor transport 26 , a scalable synthesis approach (see Methods).For the optical experiments, the monolayers are held in vacuum inside a cryostat at 4.2 K, where a magnetic field is applied perpendicular to the sample plane (Faraday geometry).Experiments are performed in the reflection geometry where a confocal microscope allows 3 for both laser excitation with a beam focal spot of ~1 µm and collection of the emission (see Methods and Supplementary Fig. S1).The WSe2 monolayer is excited using a continuous-wave (cw) laser at a wavelength of 637 nm. Figure 1a shows the emergence of sharp spectral lines, which are red shifted by ~40-100 meV from the PL of the delocalized valley excitons (see right inset of Fig. 1a). With an excitation power of 6 µW, the peak intensity of the sharp lines are ~500 times stronger than the delocalized valley excitons. The left inset of Fig. 1a shows the fine structure of the highestintensity line (we call SQE1), which is composed of a doublet. The red lines are Lorentzian fits which yield linewidths of ~112 µeV and ~122 µeV (FWHM) and a splitting of 0.68 meV.A statistical histogram on 92 randomly localized emitters from 15 different monolayers is presented in Fig. 1b, yielding linewidths ranging from 58 µeV to 500 µeV, with an average spectral linewidth of 130 µeV, roughly two orders of magnitude smaller than the linewidth of the delocalized exciton PL. The linewidth of these emitters increases dramatically when the temperature is increased (see Supplementary Fig. S2).The sharp lines are highly spatially localized. Figure 1c illustrates a scanning confocal microscope image of the PL from the emission line centered at 1.7186 eV. The isolated bright spots show that the emission is from localized sites, which are likely excitons bound to atomic defects. These sharp lines show strong saturation behavior as a function of laser power. We investigate the power dependence of the SQE1 peak at 1.7156 eV (left inset of Fig. 1a) as an example. Figure 1d shows the integrated counts as a function of excitation power, demonstrating a pronounced saturation behavior similar to an atom-like two-level system.Under excitation with a 3-ps pulsed laser at ...

A light approach to quantum advantage Quantum computational advantage or supremacy is a long-anticipated milestone toward practical quantum computers. Recent work claimed to have reached this point, but subsequent work managed to speed up the classical simulation and pointed toward a sample size–dependent loophole. Quantum computational advantage, rather than being a one-shot experimental proof, will be the result of a long-term competition between quantum devices and classical simulation. Zhong et al. sent 50 indistinguishable single-mode squeezed states into a 100-mode ultralow-loss interferometer and sampled the output using 100 high-efficiency single-photon detectors. By obtaining up to 76-photon coincidence, yielding a state space dimension of about 10 30 , they measured a sampling rate that is about 10 14 -fold faster than using state-of-the-art classical simulation strategies and supercomputers. Science , this issue p. 1460

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Quantum computing experiments are moving into a new realm of increasing size and complexity, with the short-term goal of demonstrating an advantage over classical computers. Boson sampling is a promising platform for such a goal, however, the number of involved single photons was up to five so far, limiting these small-scale implementations to a proof-of-principle stage. Here, we develop solidstate sources of highly efficient, pure and indistinguishable single photons, and 3D integration of ultra-low-loss optical circuits. We perform an experiment with 20 single photons fed into a 60-mode interferometer, and, in its output, sample over Hilbert spaces with a size of 10 14 -over ten orders of magnitude larger than all previous experiments. The results are validated against distinguishable samplers and uniform samplers with a confidence level of 99.9%.