Room-temperature giant Stark effect of single photon emitter in van der Waals material

Single photon emitters (SPEs) are critical building blocks needed for quantum science and technology. For practical applications, large-scale room-temperature solid-state platforms are required. Color centers in layered hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) have recently been found to be ultra-bright and stable SPEs at room temperature. Yet, to scale up solid-state quantum information processing, large tuning range of single photon energy is demanded for wavelength division multiplexing quantum key distribution, where indistinguishability is not required, and for indistinguishable single-photon production from multi-emitters. Stark effect can tune the single photon energy by an electric field, which however, has been achieved only at cryogenic temperature so far. Here we report the first room-temperature Stark effect of SPEs by exploiting hBN color centers. Surprisingly, we observe a giant Stark shift of single photon more than 30 meV, about one order of magnitude greater than previously reported in color center emitters. Moreover, for the first time, the orientation of the electric permanent dipole moment in the solid-state SPE is determined via angle-resolved Stark effect, revealing the intrinsic broken symmetries at such a color center. The remarkable Stark shift discovered here and the significant advance in understanding its atomic structure pave a way towards the scalable solid-state on-chip quantum communication and computation at room temperature.