Grant: Alliance Grants

2D materials represent a revolutionary platform to develop quantum sensors,where their reduced dimensionality and wide tunability provides opportunities that cannot be realised with bulk materials. Recently it has emerged that wide bandgap 2D materials,namely hexagonal Boron nitride(hBN) hosts spin-active optical defects that show huge promise for wide field and nanoscale sensing. Boron vacancy ensembles have been demonstrated as versatile wide field sensors that are sensitive to pressure, temperature and magnetic field, that can be directly layered and intergrated with other 2D materials and devices.Most recently, bright, single-photon emitting, quantum coherent spin defects were demonstrated that display S-1 ground state which can be optically initialised with up to 90% contrast in optically detected magnetic resonance.Further, the low symmetry hBN defect presents a multi-axis spin sensor which is capable of vectorial magnetometry with increased dynamic range (>150 mT) compared to uniaxial spin defects.Combined with the possibilities to fabricate this defect in nm-thick hBN, such defect presents the next-generation of nanoscale spin sensor, offering both nm-spatial resolution and large dynamic range. In transition metal dichalcogenides, such as WSe2 and MoSe2, the thinning down to a single layer has enabled bright light emission by modifying the band alignment, thus resulting in direct bands recombination and even more interesting the removal of valley degeneracy thanks to removal of inversion symmetry. The objectives of our international Canada-UK team are:1) implementation of recently discovered defects in hBN for sensing,2) spin-valley locking as a new method towards addressing optical active spin qubits,3) magnetic field sensing and imaging at the nanoscale. The generated output will contribute to advance the National Quantum Strategy in particular by enabling the Government of Canada and its key industries to be not only developers but also early adopters of new quantum sensing technologies, more specifically quantum magnetometers which are beyond state-of-the-art with respect to currently employed technologies.