Long-term data storage in diamond

Abstract

The negatively-charged nitrogen-vacancy (NV-) center in diamond is the focus of widespread attention for applications ranging from quantum information processing to nanoscale metrology. Although most work so far has focused on the NV- optical and spin properties, control of the charge state promises complementary opportunities. One intriguing possibility is the long-term storage of information, a notion we hereby introduce using NV rich, type-1b diamond. As a proof of principle, we use multi-color optical microscopy to read, write, and reset arbitrary data sets with 2-D binary bit density comparable to present digital-video-disk (DVD) technology. Leveraging on the singular dynamics of NV- ionization, we encode information on different planes of the diamond crystal with no cross talk, hence extending the storage capacity to three dimensions. Further, we correlate the center's charge state and nuclear spin polarization of the nitrogen host, and show that the latter is robust to a cycle of NV- ionization and recharge. In combination with super-resolution microscopy techniques, these observations provide a route towards sub-diffraction NV charge control, a regime where the storage capacity could exceed present technologies.

References in corpus (8)

• Coherent control of single spins in silicon carbide at room temperature
• Scalable quantum register based on coupled electron spins in a room temperature solid
• Efficient readout of a single spin state in diamond via spin-to-charge conversion
• Scanning probe microscopy with chemical contrast by nanoscale nuclear magnetic resonance
• Quantum Holographic Encoding in a Two-dimensional Electron Gas
• Coherence of an optically illuminated single nuclear spin qubit
• Optical patterning of trapped charge in nitrogen-doped diamond
• Recursive polarization of nuclear spins in diamond at arbitrary magnetic fields