The VALERIA project (Van der WaALs matERials for Integrated nAnophotonics) got a 3.2M€ budget from the European Innovation Coucil for developing a single-material platform for the realisation of on-chip photonic quantum devices exploiting the nanostructurisation of van der Waals crystals.

Integrated quantum photonics is pivotal for the implementation of quantum technologies and their transition from a laboratory to a real-life context. The building blocks of a photonic circuit may comprise one or more single photon emitters (SPEs) and diverse components, such as waveguides, beam splitters, interferometers etc. required for steering and processing the quantum signals produced by the sources. In order to minimise the circuit size and energy consumption, photonic circuits should integrate as many components as possible on a same chip. Currently, it is extremely challenging finding a single material that can be used both as SPE and medium in which the single photons are transmitted.
The aim of VALERIA is the fabrication of a device made of a single non-centrosymmetric transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) bulk crystal embedding site-controlled SPEs deterministically integrated with photonic crystal cavities etched into the TMDC and coupled to electric-field configurable waveguides/beamsplitters.

The 4-year project (coordinated by Prof. A. Polimeni, Sapienza University of Rome) just started, with Kick Off meeting hosted by Sapienza on 22-23 May, 2025. CNR-IFN (Dr. G. Pettinari being the deputy PI of the whole project) will oversee the fabrication and structural characterization of samples realized within the project. Other partners in VALERIA are Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Uniwersytet Warszawski, Technische Universitat Dortmund, Chalmers Tekniska Hogskola, and Weizmann Institute of Science.