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Observing bulk diamond spin coherence in high-purity nanodiamonds

Nature Materials volume 13, pages 21–25 (2014)Cite this article

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Abstract

Nitrogen–vacancy (NV) centres in diamond are attractive for research straddling quantum information science1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, nanoscale magnetometry9,10,11,12,13 and thermometry14,15. Whereas ultrapure bulk diamond NVs sustain the longest spin coherence times among optically accessible spins16,17,18, nanodiamond NVs exhibit persistently poor spin coherence17,19,20. Here we introduce high-purity nanodiamonds accommodating record-long NV coherence times, >60 μs, observed through universal dynamical decoupling21. We show that the main contribution to decoherence comes from nearby nitrogen impurities rather than surface states. We protect the NV spin free precession, essential to d.c. magnetometry, by driving solely these impurities into the motional narrowing regime. This extends the NV free induction decay time from 440 ns, longer than that in type Ib bulk diamond22, to 1.27 μs, which is comparable to that in type IIa (impurity-free) diamond23. These properties allow the simultaneous exploitation of both high sensitivity and nanometre resolution in diamond-based emergent quantum technologies24.

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Figure 1: Nanodiamond size and NV coherence statistics.
Figure 2: Universal dynamical decoupling in nanodiamonds.
Figure 3: Nitrogen–vacancy magnetometry on the spin reservoir.
Figure 4: Coherent control and motional averaging of reservoir spins.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge financial support by the University of Cambridge, the European Research Council (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant agreement no. 209636, and the FP7 Marie Curie Initial Training Network S3NANO. We thank I. Aharonovich and NaBond for providing the materials, T. Muller, S. Topliss and Y. Alaverdyan for technical assistance and F. Jelezko, R. Hanson and C. Degen for fruitful discussions.

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  1. Helena S. Knowles and Dhiren M. Kara: These authors contributed equally to this work

  2. Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0HE, UK

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Helena S. Knowles

  2. Mete Atatüre

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  1. Helena S. Knowles
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the concept and design of the experiments, discussed the results and wrote the manuscript. H.S.K. and D.M.K. performed the measurements and data analysis.

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Correspondence to Helena S. Knowles or Mete Atatüre.

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Knowles, H., Kara, D. & Atatüre, M. Observing bulk diamond spin coherence in high-purity nanodiamonds. Nature Mater 13, 21–25 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3805

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