Proposal for enhanced resolution in nanoscale NMR: quantum sensing with pulses of finite duration

Abstract

The nitrogen vacancy (NV) color center in diamond is an enormously important platform for the development of quantum sensors, including for single spin and single molecule NMR. Detection of weak single-spin signals is greatly enhanced by repeated sequences of microwave pulses; in these dynamical decoupling (DD) techniques, the key control parameters swept in the experiment are the time intervals, $\tau$, between pulses. Here we show that, in fact, the pulse duration offers a powerful additional control parameter. While previously, a non-negligible pulse-width has been considered simply a source of experimental error, here we elucidate the underlying quantum dynamics: we identify a landscape of quantum-state crossings which are usually closed (inactive) but may be controllably activated (opened) by adjusting the pulse-width from zero. We identify these crossings with recently observed but unexpected dips (so called spurious dips) seen in the quantum coherence of the NV spin. With this new understanding, both the position and strength of these sharp features may be accurately controlled; they co-exist with the usual broader coherence dips of short-duration microwave pulses, but their sharpness allows for higher resolution spectroscopy with quantum diamond sensors, or their analogues.

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• Dynamical decoupling based quantum sensing: Floquet spectroscopy
• Noise-resilient Quantum Computing with a Nitrogen-Vacancy Center and Nuclear Spins
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Cited by in corpus (16)

• One-second coherence for a single electron spin coupled to a multi-qubit nuclear-spin environment
• Quantum Metrology with Strongly Interacting Spin Systems
• Robust Dynamic Hamiltonian Engineering of Many-Body Spin Systems
• Randomisation of Pulse Phases for Unambiguous and Robust Quantum Sensing
• Soft Quantum Control for Highly Selective Interactions among Joint Quantum Systems
• The non-vanishing effect of detuning errors in dynamical decoupling based quantum sensing experiments
• Modulated Continuous Wave Control for Energy-efficient Electron-nuclear Spin Coupling
• Shaped Pulses for Energy Efficient High-Field NMR at the Nanoscale
• Robust Detection of High-Frequency Signals at the Nanoscale
• Enhancing the robustness of dynamical decoupling sequences with correlated random phases
• Quantum bath control with nuclear spin state selectivity via pulse-adjusted dynamical decoupling
• Dynamical decoupling methods in nanoscale NMR
• Floquet engineering using pulse driving in a diamond two-level system under a large-amplitude modulation
• Double Quantum Magnetometry at Large Static Magnetic Fields
• Characterizing the magnetic noise power spectrum of dark spins in diamond
• Selective Hybrid Spin Interactions with Low Radiation Power