For Nanowires, Nothing Sparkles Quite Like Diamond

Diamonds are renowned for their seemingly flawless physical beauty and their interplay with light. Now researchers are taking advantage of the mineral's imperfections to control that light at the atomic scale, generating one photon at a time. A team of engineers and applied physicists has sculpted a novel nanowire from diamond crystal and shown that the wire can act as a source of single photons.

To create their diamond nanowire device, the researchers took advantage of the same physical processes that give some colored diamonds their hues. For example, when a diamond appears blue or yellow, the pure carbon of the diamond crystal has been sullied by scattered impurities that were incorporated into the carbon while the diamond was forming. Atoms of boron result in a blue diamond; atoms of nitrogen yield a yellow diamond.

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Image credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation