Combining femtosecond laser annealing and shallow ion implantation for local color center creation in diamond

Abstract

A common technique for color center creation in wideband gap semiconductors employs ion implantation and a subsequent thermal annealing. In general, this annealing process is conducted in an vacuum oven. Here, we exploit the annealing based on femtosecond laser pulses. For that purpose, we implant fluorine ions at 54 keV and chlorine ions at 74 keV in diamond and perform micrometer precise annealing using focused femtosecond laser pulses at 800 ± (30) nm with different pulse numbers and repetition rates. In this way, we were able to create shallow spots with color centers of varying brightness.