Future quantum technologies will require non-classical light sources emitting indistinguishable photons on-demand with high efficiency and purity. These sources will have to be fabricated via simple and cost-effective methods and, at the same time, be compatible with current photonic integration technologies. Epitaxial quantum dots are currently emerging as near-ideal single-photon sources but, after almost 20 years of extensive efforts, bringing them out of research laboratories remains a grand challenge, mainly due to the difficulty of fulfilling the scalability requirement set by quantum technologies. The STRATEGINO (STRAin shaping of Two-dimensional crystals for singlE photon GeneratIoN and manipulatiOn) project aims at developing a cheap, scalable approach to the fabrication of near-ideal single-photon sources, by inducing nanoscale deformations in atomically thin membranes made of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). In order to induce these deformations -which have shown the ability to act as efficient single photon emitters- we will rely on our recent discovery that the H irradiation of bulk TMD flakes results in the formation of monolayer-thick, highly strained domes. These domes are stable and robust, and lithographic techniques allow engineering their formation process so that they can be produced with well-ordered positions, controllable shape, and sizes tunable from the nanometer to the micrometer scale. Our nanodome-based photon sources will be created spatially and spectrally resonant with the electromagnetic field of a circular Bragg-grating microcavity, to ensure efficient light extraction. Moreover, they will be integrated onto micro-machined piezo-electric devices, thus enabling a fine tuning of their emission properties. We envisage that our scalable platform will open the way towards the real exploitation of solid-state sources of non-classical light in quantum technologies.
