20.500.12556/RUL-168198 Intracellular biocompatible hexagonal boron nitride quantum emitters as single-photon sources and barcodes Color centers in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) have been emerging as a multifunctional platform for various optical applications including quantum information processing, quantum computing and imaging. Simultaneously, due to its biocompatibility and biodegradability hBN is a promising material for biomedical applications. In this work, we demonstrate single-photon emission from hBN color centers embedded inside live cells and their application to cellular barcoding. The generation and internalization of multiple color centers into cells was performed via simple and scalable procedure while keeping the cells unharmed. The emission from live cells was observed as multiple diffraction-limited spots, which exhibited excellent single-photon characteristics with high single-photon purity of 0.1 and superb emission stability without photobleaching or spectral shifts over several hours. Due to different emission wavelengths and peak widths of the color centers, they were employed as barcodes. We term them Quantum Photonic Barcodes (QPBs). Each QPB can exist in one out of 470 possible distinguishable states and a combination of a few QPBs per cell can be used to uniquely tag virtually an unlimited number of cells. The barcodes developed here offer some excellent properties, including ease of production by a single-step procedure, biocompatibility and biodegradability, emission stability, no photobleaching, small size and a huge number of unique barcodes. This work provides a basis for the use of hBN color centers for robust barcoding of cells and due to the single photon emission, presented concepts could in future be extended to quantum-limited sensing and super-resolution imaging. hexagonal boron nitride single-photon source color centers live cells spectral barcodes cell tagging heksagonalni borov nitrid vir enofotonskih delcev barvni centri žive celice spektralne črtne kode označevanje celic true false true Angleški jezik Slovenski jezik Članek v reviji 2025-04-02 11:39:40 2025-04-02 11:39:43 2025-04-03 04:02:36 0000-00-00 00:00:00 2024 0 0 Str. 4691–4702 iss. 9 Vol. 16 2024 0000-00-00 Zaloznikova Objavljeno NiDoloceno 0000-00-00 0000-00-00 0000-00-00 544.522.122 2040-3372 10.1039/D3NR05305A 183750147 Kavcic_..._Intracellular_biocompatible.pdf Kavcic_..._Intracellular_biocompatible.pdf 1 B83220AF482DF6183592294EA7F49111 bf8a7434bfff95cb7b853d64c52c72581d66ba52ad2d8809f6dd919f572fcaf6 e950711c-0fa5-11f0-b232-0050569b8976 https://repozitorij.uni-lj.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=201297 https://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2024/NR/D3NR05305A 1 5eae032c-0fa5-11f0-b232-0050569b8976 https://repozitorij.uni-lj.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=201296 Fakulteta za strojništvo Fakulteta za matematiko in fiziko 0 0 0