Stimulated emission from NV centres in diamond

Abstract

Stimulated emission is the process fundamental to laser operation, thereby producing coherent photon output. Despite negatively-charged nitrogen-vacancy (NV${}^{-}$) centres being discussed as a potential laser medium since the 1980's, there have been no definitive observations of stimulated emission from ensembles of NV${}^{-}$ to date. Reasons for this lack of demonstration include the short excited state lifetime and the occurrence of photo-ionisation to the neutral charge state by light around the zero-phonon line. Here we show both theoretical and experimental evidence for stimulated emission from NV${}^{-}$ states using light in the phonon-sidebands. Our system uses a continuous wave pump laser at 532 nm and a pulsed stimulating laser that is swept across the phononic sidebands of the NV${}^{-}$. Optimal stimulated emission is demonstrated in the vicinity of the three-phonon line at 700 nm. Furthermore, we show the transition from stimulated emission to photoionisation as the stimulating laser wavelength is reduced from 700nm to 620 nm. While lasing at the zero-phonon line is suppressed by ionisation, our results open the possibility of diamond lasers based on NV centres, tuneable over the phonon-sideband. This broadens the applications of NV magnetometers from single centre nanoscale sensors to a new generation of ultra-precise ensemble laser sensors, which exploit the contrast and signal amplification of a lasing system.

References in corpus (10)

• Magnetometry with nitrogen-vacancy defects in diamond
• Scalable quantum register based on coupled electron spins in a room temperature solid
• Nanoscale magnetic imaging of a single electron spin under ambient conditions
• Broadband Magnetometry and Temperature Sensing with a Light Trapping Diamond Waveguide
• Low Temperature Studies of Charge Dynamics of Nitrogen-Vacancy Defect in Diamond
• Efficient readout of a single spin state in diamond via spin-to-charge conversion
• All-optical thermometry and the thermal properties of the optically detected spin resonances of the NV center in nano-diamond
• Cavity-enhanced room-temperature magnetometry using absorption by nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond
• Towards a picosecond transform-limited nitrogen-vacancy based single photon source
• Laser threshold magnetometry

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• NV${}^{-}$ Diamond Laser
• Charge State Dynamics During Excitation and Depletion of the Nitrogen Vacancy Center in Diamond
• Photoionization of negatively charged NV centers in diamond: theory and ab initio calculations
• Infrared laser magnetometry with a NV doped diamond intracavity etalon
• NV-Metamaterial: Tunable Quantum Hyperbolic Metamaterial Using Nitrogen-Vacancy Centers in Diamond
• Stimulated emission depletion spectroscopy of color centers in hexagonal boron nitride
• Absorption and birefringence study for reduced optical losses in diamond with high NV concentration
• Probing NV and SiV charge state dynamics using high-voltage nanosecond pulse and photoluminescence spectral analysis
• Finding the nitrogen-vacancy singlet manifold energy level using charge conversion pulse sequences
• High-contrast absorption magnetometry in the visible to near-infrared range with nitrogen-vacancy ensembles
• Creation of nitrogen-vacancy centers in chemical vapor deposition diamond for sensing applications
• A scalable method for cavity-enhanced solid-state quantum sensors
• Two-media laser threshold magnetometry: A magnetic-field-dependent laser threshold
• Magnetic-Field-Dependent Stimulated Emission from Nitrogen-Vacancy Centres in Diamond