Ultrabright Room-Temperature Sub-Nanosecond Emission from Single Nitrogen-Vacancy Centers Coupled to Nanopatch Antennas

Solid-state quantum emitters are in high demand for emerging technologies such as advanced sensing and quantum information processing. Generally, these emitters are not sufficiently bright for practical applications, and a promising solution consists in coupling them to plasmonic nanostructures. Plasmonic nanostructures support broadband modes, making it possible to speed up the fluorescence emission in room-temperature emitters by several orders of magnitude. However, one has not yet achieved such a fluorescence lifetime shortening without a substantial loss in emission efficiency, largely because of strong absorption in metals and emitter bleaching. Here, we demonstrate ultrabright single-photon emission from photostable nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in nanodiamonds coupled to plasmonic nanocavities made of low-loss single-crystalline silver. We observe a 70-fold difference between the average fluorescence lifetimes and a 90-fold increase in the average detected saturated intensity. The nanocavity-coupled NVs produce up to 35 million photon counts per second, several times more than the previously reported rates from room-temperature quantum emitters.