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Probing Spin Dynamics on Diamond Surfaces Using a Single Quantum Sensor

Bo L. Dwyer, Lila V.H. Rodgers, Elana K. Urbach, Dolev Bluvstein, Sorawis Sangtawesin, Hengyun Zhou, Yahia Nassab, Mattias Fitzpatrick, Zhiyang Yuan, Kristiaan De Greve, Eric L. Peterson, Helena Knowles, Tamara Sumarac, Jyh-Pin Chou, Adam Gali, V.V. Dobrovitski, Mikhail D. Lukin, and Nathalie P. de Leon
PRX Quantum 3, 040328 – Published 14 December 2022
Physics logo See Viewpoint: Spin-Interaction Studies Take on a New Dimension

Abstract

Understanding the dynamics of a quantum bit’s environment is essential for the realization of practical systems for quantum information processing and metrology. We use single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond to study the dynamics of a disordered spin ensemble at the diamond surface. Specifically, we reduce the density of “dark” surface spins to interrogate their contribution to the decoherence of shallow NV center spin qubits. When the average surface spin spacing exceeds the NV center depth, we find that the surface spin contribution to the NV center free induction decay can be described by a stretched exponential with variable power n. We show that these observations are consistent with a model in which the spatial positions of the surface spins are fixed for each measurement, but some of them reconfigure between measurements. In particular, we observe a depth-dependent critical time associated with a dynamical transition from Gaussian (n=2) decay to n=2/3, and show that this transition arises from the competition between the small decay contributions of many distant spins and strong coupling to a few proximal spins at the surface. These observations demonstrate the potential of a local sensor for understanding complex systems and elucidate pathways for improving and controlling spin qubits at the surface.

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  • Received 24 March 2022
  • Revised 27 June 2022
  • Accepted 6 October 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuantum.3.040328

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

  1. Physical Systems
Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied PhysicsAtomic, Molecular & OpticalQuantum Information, Science & Technology

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Spin-Interaction Studies Take on a New Dimension

Published 3 January 2023

Studies of how a nitrogen-vacancy center’s spin interacts with a surrounding 2D layer of spins could lead to new platforms for quantum metrology and simulation.

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Authors & Affiliations

Bo L. Dwyer1,†, Lila V.H. Rodgers2,†, Elana K. Urbach1,†, Dolev Bluvstein1, Sorawis Sangtawesin3, Hengyun Zhou1, Yahia Nassab2,‡, Mattias Fitzpatrick2, Zhiyang Yuan2, Kristiaan De Greve1,§, Eric L. Peterson1, Helena Knowles1,¶, Tamara Sumarac1, Jyh-Pin Chou4, Adam Gali5,6, V.V. Dobrovitski7, Mikhail D. Lukin1, and Nathalie P. de Leon2,*

  • 1Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
  • 2Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
  • 3School of Physics and Center of Excellence in Advanced Functional Materials, Suranaree University of Technology, Nakhon Ratchasima 30000, Thailand
  • 4Department of Physics, National Changhua University of Education, Changhua 50007, Taiwan
  • 5Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics, Wigner Research Centre for Physics, POB 49, Budapest H-1525, Hungary
  • 6Department of Atomic Physics, Institute of Physics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Műegyetem rakpart 3., Budapest 1111, Hungary
  • 7QuTech and Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, Delft University of Technology, Delft 2628 CD, Netherlands

  • *Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to npdeleon@princeton.edu
  • These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • Current address: Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada.
  • §Current address: Inter-university Microelectronics Centre, Imec, Kapeldreef 75, Leuven, Belgium.
  • Current address: Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB3 0HE, United Kingdom

Popular Summary

Atomic defects in diamond known as color centers are promising candidates for a host of quantum information and sensing technologies. For nanoscale sensing applications, these defects must be located next to the sensing target, which necessitates creating these defects near the diamond surface, where they can be overwhelmed by surface-related noise sources. Understanding the nature of this surface noise is thus an important step toward improving sensing technologies based on these color centers.

One class of surface defects is unpaired electron spins that are present in nearly all diamond samples. By measuring the effect these surface spins have on over 100 nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers across many diamond samples, we gain insight into the dynamic nature of these surface spins and resolve some longstanding mysteries. In particular, we find that their coupling statistics and the shape of the coherence decay curve are inconsistent with static spatial arrangements of spins on the diamond surface, and instead are consistent with the surface spins spatially reconfiguring in time. In the very dilute limit, the shape of the NV center coherence decay exhibits an abrupt transition at a critical time that corresponds to the distance between the NV center and the surface spin bath.

We show that detailed analysis of NV center coherence can be used as a powerful probe of the dynamics of the environment, and our experiments help pave the way for potential techniques to mitigate surface noise and harness local quantum sensors to study many-body dynamics.

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Vol. 3, Iss. 4 — December - December 2022

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