Effect of Low-Damage Inductively Coupled Plasma on Shallow NV Centers in Diamond

Abstract

Near-surface nitrogen-vacancy ({NV}) centers in diamond have been successfully employed as atomic-sized magnetic field sensors for external spins over the last years. A key challenge is still to develop a method to bring NV centers at nanometer proximity to the diamond surface while preserving their optical and spin properties. To that aim we present a method of controlled diamond etching with nanometric precision using an oxygen inductively coupled plasma (ICP) process. Importantly, no traces of plasma-induced damages to the etched surface could be detected by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and confocal photoluminescence microscopy techniques. In addition, by profiling the depth of NV centers created by 5.0 keV of nitrogen implantation energy, no plasma-induced quenching in their fluorescence could be observed. Moreover, the developed etching process allowed even the channeling tail in their depth distribution to be resolved. Furthermore, treating a 12C isotopically purified diamond revealed a threefold increase in T2 times for NV centers with <4 nm of depth (measured by NMR signal from protons at the diamond surface) in comparison to the initial oxygen-terminated surface.

5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Engineering shallow spins in diamond with nitrogen delta-doping
• Extending spin coherence times of diamond qubits by high temperature annealing
• Nanoscale nuclear magnetic resonance with a 1.9-nm-deep nitrogen-vacancy sensor
• Vertical distribution of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond formed by ion implantation and annealing
• Three-dimensional localization of spins in diamond using 12C implantation
• Long coherence time of spin qubits in ${}^{12}$C enriched polycrystalline CVD diamond
• Statistical investigations on nitrogen-vacancy center creation

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