Construction and operation of a tabletop system for nanoscale magnetometry with single nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond

Abstract

A single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond is a prime candidate for a solid-state quantum magnetometer capable of detecting single nuclear spins with prospective application to nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) at the nanoscale. Nonetheless, an NV magnetometer is still less accessible to many chemists and biologists, as its experimental setup and operational principle are starkly different from those of conventional NMR. Here, we design, construct, and operate a compact tabletop-sized system for quantum sensing with a single NV center, built primarily from commercially available optical components and electronics. We show that our setup can implement state-of-the-art quantum sensing protocols that enable the detection of single ${}^{13}$C nuclear spins in diamond and the characterization of their interaction parameters, as well as the detection of a small ensemble of proton nuclear spins on the diamond surface. This article providing extensive discussions on the details of the setup and the experimental procedures, our system will be reproducible by those who have not worked on the NV centers previously.

25 pages, 14 figures, 7 tables. Published in AIP Advances (Open Access). Many parts are pedagogical

References in corpus (16)

• Universal dynamical decoupling of a single solid-state spin from a spin bath
• Sub-millihertz magnetic spectroscopy with a nanoscale quantum sensor
• Detection and control of individual nuclear spins using a weakly coupled electron spin
• Quantum sensing with arbitrary frequency resolution
• Engineering shallow spins in diamond with nitrogen delta-doping
• Nanoscale NMR Spectroscopy and Imaging of Multiple Nuclear Species
• The negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy centre in diamond: the electronic solution
• Electron spin decoherence of single Nitrogen-Vacancy defects in diamond
• Nuclear spin pair coherence in diamond for atomic scale magnetometry
• Scanning probe microscopy with chemical contrast by nanoscale nuclear magnetic resonance
• Spurious harmonic response of multipulse quantum sensing sequences
• Photophysics of single nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond nanocrystals
• Three-dimensional localization of spins in diamond using 12C implantation
• Polarization- and frequency-tunable microwave circuit for selective excitation of nitrogen-vacancy spins in diamond
• Highly-tunable formation of nitrogen-vacancy centers via ion implantation
• High resolution quantum sensing with shaped control pulses

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Detection and control of single proton spins in a thin layer of diamond grown by chemical vapor deposition
• Spin coherence and depths of single nitrogen-vacancy centers created by ion implantation into diamond via screening masks
• Demonstration of highly-sensitive wideband microwave sensing using ensemble nitrogen-vacancy centers
• Demonstration of geometric diabatic control of quantum states