TECHNOLOGY LICENSING OPPORTUNITY: PinPoint Photon

Scope

Single Photon Generation Through Mechanical Deformation Value Proposition PinPoint Photon from Los Alamos National Laboratory gives quantum technology developers something they have long lacked: single photon sources that appear exactly where a designer places them.

The approach relies on a wafer-scale film of an ultra-thin semiconductor shaped over precisely patterned tips.

Light emitters can therefore be arranged in predictable arrays rather than found by chance.

Early testing produced emitters at nearly nine out of 10 tip sites, with stable output for hours and excited-state lifetimes many times longer than those of unstrained material.

Hardware teams in secure communications, photonic computing and quantum sensing gain a practical path from laboratory demonstrations to manufacturable chips.

Challenges Many emerging quantum technologies need light that arrives one photon at a time.

Examples include encryption keys that cannot be intercepted unnoticed and optical quantum computers.

Ultra-thin 2D materials such as tungsten diselenide, tungsten disulfide and hexagonal boron nitride can produce such photons, but only from defects that form randomly, with no reliable way to control their location.

Earlier attempts to guide emission by patterning the surface underneath the film could not separate the effect of mechanical strain from changes in the surrounding material, so the underlying physics stayed unclear.

Most 2D quantum materials have also come from lab-scale methods such as peeling flakes off a crystal, which are unsuitable for large-scale device integration.

Secure communication systems further need each site to hold no more than one emitter, a level of control that random defects cannot provide.

Problems Solved PinPoint Photon replaces chance with design.

A continuous few-lay...