Room-temperature strong coupling in a single photon emitter-dielectric metasurface system

Abstract: Single-photon sources with high brightness and long coherence time are promising qubit candidates for quantum technology. To this end, interfacing emitters with high-finesse cavities is required, especially in the strong coupling regime, which so far has only been limited to cryogenic temperatures. Here, we experimentally demonstrate, at room temperature, strong coupling between a single photon emitter and a novel cavity based on optical bound states in the continuum. A remarkably large Rabi splitting of ~4 meV is achieved thanks to the combination of the narrow linewidth and large oscillator strength of emitters in hexagonal boron nitride and the efficient photon trapping of the cavity. Our findings unveil new opportunities to realise scalable quantum devices and explore fundamentally new regimes of strong coupling in quantum systems at room-temperature.