Optically Induced Polarization and Depolarization of an Electron Spin in a Nitrogen-Vacancy Center of Diamond Nano-crystals

Abstract

Pulsed laser excitation causes the luminescence of Nitrogen Vacancy centers in diamond to unexpectedly decrease with increasing pulse energy. This decrease is observed in both the negatively charged and neutral centers and is caused by shortening of the luminescence lifetimes of the centers of both types. In darkness, the luminescence does not show any recovery on a time scale of 10 microseconds but as little as three low-intensity pulses can return the luminescence to its previous, brighter state. An external magnetic field reduces the magnitude of the effect. A possible mechanism for these phenomena based on optical polarisation and depolarisation of an electronic spin is proposed.

12 text pages + 7 figures + references. A new figure and a reference are added. The data in the figure support the model and the data of the first version

References in corpus (11)

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Integrated Single Photon Emitters
• NV-centers in Nanodiamonds: How good they are
• Exploiting ionization dynamics in the nitrogen vacancy center for rapid, high-contrast spin and charge state initialization
• The electron-phonon processes of the nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond
• Microwave-assisted spectroscopy technique for studying charge state in nitrogen-vacancy ensembles in diamond
• High resolution imaging with anomalous saturated excitation