The Institut NEEL, UPR 2940 CNRS, is one of the largest French national research institutes for fundamental research in condensed matter physics enriched by interdisciplinary activities at the interfaces with chemistry, engineering and biology. The laboratory is related to the CNRS Physique. It is located in the heart of a unique scientific, industrial and cultural environment. It is part of one of Europe's biggest high-tech environment in micro- and nanoelectronics, right next to the French Alpes.
The job is linked to the NPSC team, which explores new physical phenomena, related to photons, electrons and spin, at quantum scale, in II-VI and III-V semiconductors nanostructures.
The Institut NEEL is a CNRS laboratory. CNRS is a public, scientific and technological organisation. The core mandate is to identify, carry out ou have carried out, either alone or with partners, all research that advances science or contributes to the country's economic, social, and cultural progress. Internationally recognised for the excellence of its scientific research, the CNRS is a reference in the world of research and development, as well as for the general public.

This concept is of utmost importance in modern physics, as it quantifies the ability to generate and to sustain quantum superposition states. Measuring, controlling and propagating coherence and assessing the sources of dephasing of individual two-level systems, i.e. qubits, is a prerequisite for development of any quantum technologies. Probably the most known example of optically active qubits are single photon emitters in epitaxial and colloidal QDs; Their
importance in optoelectronics has just been acknowledged by awarding a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For many years, we have been studying quantum coherence in single QDs, by developing tools of coherent nonlinear ultrafast spectroscopy. The equipped laboratory dedicated for these experiments and now waiting for a PhD candidate, is located at Néel Institute in Grenoble - a capital city of French Alpes. He/she will be trained to rapidly gain autonomy in these advanced optical experiments. The coherent spectroscopy activity at Institut Néel represents a large part (at least 1/3) of this thesis. Unfortunately, even in the single QDs of highest quality the coherence is lost with increasing the temperature, such that it cannot be measured above 30 Kelvins. This issue can be overcome by shifting to a different
material. With the aim to measure quantum coherence in solids at elevated temperatures, approaching ambient conditions, we will employ quantum emitters in diamond. In particular, a silicon-vacancy centre SiV- offers many advantages: i) a bright and stable emission at the near-infra red range, ii) supressed spectral fluctuations due to an intrinsic symmetry of this defect, iii) a high fraction (~80%) of its emission contained in a zero-phonon line, iv) and most importantly, the optical transition displays single photon emission properties up to a room temperature.
Especially for this project, high quality diamond layers containing SiV- centres will be grown at NIMS at Tsukuba by a world expert in this field:
A prerequisite to measure coherence of single solidstate quantum emitters is an optimized light-matter coupling. This can be achieved by equipping the
sample with photonic structures. To increase the light extraction/injection efficiency from/into SiV-, we will fabricate patterns of bullseye cavities in diamond, see
Figure 1. This task can be carried out by using plasma etching facilities and electron beam lithography operational at the University of Tsukuba and NIMS.
This is a 3-years international PhD research project funded by the CNRS and coordinated by MITI (Mission pour les Initiatives Transverses et Interdisciplinaires).
The project will be carried out in a framework of the International Research Laboratory J-FAST, federating Institut Néel, Université Grenoble Alpes and University of Tsukuba in Japan. Starting from the 2nd year of the PhD, a research stay at the J-FAST laboratory of at least 2 months will be required and can be extended to 12 months, offering the possibility to obtain a double-diploma PhD.
We seek for a candidate, inclined towards a fundamental research, with a solid background in condensed matter physics and optics, with excellent communication skills. He/she should show aptitude for an experimental work both as regards spectroscopy and material science. The candidate also will perform: simulations (COMSOL), hardware programming (LabWindows, C), data analysis (Matlab, Origin) and text editing/publication and report writing (LaTeX).