All-Optical Nuclear Quantum Sensing using Nitrogen-Vacancy Centers in Diamond

Abstract

Solid state spins have demonstrated significant potential in quantum sensing with applications including fundamental science, medical diagnostics and navigation. The quantum sensing schemes showing best performance under ambient conditions all utilize microwave or radio-frequency driving, which poses a significant limitation for miniaturization, energy-efficiency and non-invasiveness of quantum sensors. We overcome this limitation by demonstrating a purely optical approach to coherent quantum sensing. Our scheme involves the ${}^{15}$N nuclear spin of the Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) center in diamond as a sensing resource, and exploits NV spin dynamics in oblique magnetic fields near the NV's excited state level anti-crossing to optically pump the nuclear spin into a quantum superposition state. We demonstrate all-optical free-induction decay measurements - the key protocol for low-frequency quantum sensing - both on single spins and spin ensembles. Our results pave the way for highly compact quantum sensors to be employed for magnetometry or gyroscopy applications in challenging environments.

6 pages, 4 figures, plus supplementary material. Questions and comments are welcome

References in corpus (9)

• High-sensitivity diamond magnetometer with nanoscale resolution
• Realization of a multi-node quantum network of remote solid-state qubits
• Dynamic polarization of single nuclear spins by optical pumping of NV color centers in diamond at room temperature
• Efficient readout of a single spin state in diamond via spin-to-charge conversion
• Micrometer-scale Magnetic Imaging of Geological Samples Using a Quantum Diamond Microscope
• Diamond magnetometry and gradiometry towards subpicotesla DC field measurement
• Initialization and Readout of Nuclear Spins via negatively charged Silicon-Vacancy Center in Diamond
• Demonstration of diamond nuclear spin gyroscope
• High-Field Magnetometry with Hyperpolarized Nuclear Spins

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Fabrication of oriented NV center arrays in diamond via femtosecond laser writing and reorientation
• Designing metasurface optical interfaces for solid-state qubits using many-body adjoint shape optimization
• Dynamical nuclear polarization for dissipation-induced entanglement in NV centers
• Crystal Fields and Zeeman Effect for Thulium in Solid Argon
• Efficiency of optimal control for noisy spin qubits in diamond