Spin bath mediated long-lived coherent oscillations of NV centers in diamond

Nv-Center Qubit is a spin-photon qubit approach for quantum computing hardware. Source: latex text.

Abstract

Decoherence is the biggest bottleneck in all quantum technologies. For nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, the loss of coherence is caused by the electron and nuclear spin bath of the diamond lattice. Here, we demonstrate that the spin bath - that typically causes decoherence - entangles the spin states of the NV electron and the host ${}^{14}$N nucleus. The many-body interaction between the ${}^{14}$N nucleus - electron - bath spins at an energy level anti-crossing occurring for an applied magnetic field orientation perpendicular to the NV axis is responsible for this effect. This is observed experimentally in NV ensembles via electron spin-echo measurements, where the echo envelope is modulated at the frequency of a ${}^{14}$N nuclear spin transition. Using numerical simulations, we show that the spin bath coupling to the NV centers is essential for observing this modulation. Due to the zero first-order Zeeman effect at the anti-crossing, the observed oscillations have long spin-echo coherence times, 2—3 times those at the parallel magnetic field orientation. The oscillation frequency is highly stable and robust against environmental fluctuations. These findings provide new opportunities for fundamental studies of many-body physics and quantum sensing.

Key Findings

Links

• arXiv: 2606.30146

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