Tolerance in the Ramsey interference of a trapped nanodiamond

Abstract

The scheme recently proposed in [M. Scala et al., Phys Rev Lett 111, 180403 (2013)], where a gravity-dependent phase shift is induced on the spin of a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in a trapped nanodiamond by the interaction between its magnetic moment and the quantized motion of the particle, provides a way to detect spatial quantum superpositions by means of spin measurements only. Here, the effect of unwanted coupling with other motional degrees of freedom is considered and we show that it does not affect the validity of the scheme. Both this coupling and the additional error source due to misalignment between the quantization axis of the NV center spin and the trapping axis are shown not to change the qualitative behavior of the system, so that a proof-of- principle experiment can be neatly performed. Our analysis, which shows that the scheme retains the important features of not requiring ground state cooling and of being resistant to thermal fluctuations, can be useful for the several schemes which have been proposed recently for testing macroscopic superpositions in trapped microsystems.

8 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (8)

• QuTiP 2: A Python framework for the dynamics of open quantum systems
• Millikelvin cooling of an optically trapped microsphere in vacuum
• Large Quantum Superpositions and Interference of Massive Nanometer-Sized Objects
• Macroscopicity of Mechanical Quantum Superposition States
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Cited by in corpus (15)

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• Free Nano-Object Ramsey Interferometry for Large Quantum Superpositions
• Optical levitation of high purity nanodiamonds in vacuum without heating
• Long Spin Coherence Times of Nitrogen Vacancy Centres in Milled Nanodiamonds
• Experiments testing macroscopic quantum superpositions must be slow
• Quantum experiments with microscale particles
• Spin-Controlled Quantum Interference of Levitated Nanorotors
• Magnetometry via spin-mechanical coupling in levitated optomechanics
• Spin dynamical decoupling for generating macroscopic superpositions of a free-falling nanodiamond
• High-precision gravimeter based on a nano-mechanical resonator hybrid with an electron spin
• An analytical model for the detection of levitated nanoparticles in optomechanics
• Matter and spin superposition in vacuum experiment (MASSIVE)
• Gyroscopically stabilized quantum spin rotors
• Comment on "Matter-Wave Interferometry of a Levitated Thermal Nano-Oscillator Induced and Probed by a Spin"
• Towards a test of quantum gravity with a levitated nanodiamond containing a spin