Optical spin defect pairs in cubic boron nitride

Abstract

Room-temperature optically active solid-state spin defects are widely known to be useful in quantum sensing applications, however, only a select range of materials have been found to host such systems. Recent measurements in the van der Waals material hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) have shown optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) with spin-1/2-like signatures can be explained by a charge transfer mechanism where charges move between adjacent defects forming weakly coupled spin pairs. Interestingly, these ODMR signatures have been reported in a variety of materials aside from hBN, suggesting the spin pair model provides a potentially material agnostic approach for enabling ODMR. Here, we test whether the charge transfer mechanism is supported in a different crystal phase, and report on ODMR signatures in cubic boron nitride (cBN), showing all the characteristic properties identified in hBN are preserved. We consider a selection of different cBN samples of varying size and observe ODMR from a single sub-micron cBN particle, paving the way towards sensing applications. This work further expands understanding of the ubiquity of optical spin defect pairs, and establishes the potential for exploring quantum technologies with a wider range of materials.

10 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (18)

• The nitrogen-vacancy colour centre in diamond
• Coherent control of single spins in silicon carbide at room temperature
• Room Temperature Initialisation and Readout of Intrinsic Spin Defects in a Van der Waals Crystal
• Qubit teleportation between non-neighboring nodes in a quantum network
• Sub-nanoscale Temperature, Magnetic Field and Pressure sensing with Spin Centers in 2D hexagonal Boron Nitride
• Room-temperature optically detected magnetic resonance of single defects in hexagonal boron nitride
• Room Temperature Coherent Control of Spin Defects in hexagonal Boron Nitride
• Single spin resonance in a van der Waals embedded paramagnetic defect
• Probing many-body dynamics in a two dimensional dipolar spin ensemble
• Coherent control of an ultrabright single spin in hexagonal boron nitride at room temperature
• Multi-species optically addressable spin defects in a van der Waals material
• Single nuclear spin detection and control in a van der Waals material
• Cubic BN optical gap and intragap optically active defects
• Photoluminescence from voids created by femtosecond laser pulses inside cubic-BN
• Nanotube spin defects for omnidirectional magnetic field sensing
• Violet to near-infrared optical addressing of spin pairs in hexagonal boron nitride
• Coherent Spins in van der Waals Semiconductor GeS2 at Ambient Conditions
• Radiofrequency receiver based on isotropic solid-state spins