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arXiv:1008.2119 · Science

Universal Dynamical Decoupling of a Single Solid-State Spin from a Spin Bath

G. de Lange, Z. H. Wang, Diego Ristè, V. V. Dobrovitski, Ronald Hanson

Published Sep 9, 2010• 803 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Controlling the interaction of a single quantum system with its environment is a fundamental challenge in quantum science and technology. We strongly suppressed the coupling of a single spin in diamond with the surrounding spin bath by using double-axis dynamical decoupling. The coherence was preserved for arbitrary quantum states, as verified by quantum process tomography. The resulting coherence time enhancement followed a general scaling with the number of decoupling pulses. No limit was observed for the decoupling action up to 136 pulses, for which the coherence time was enhanced more than 25 times compared to that obtained with spin echo. These results uncover a new regime for experimental quantum science and allow us to overcome a major hurdle for implementing quantum information protocols.

DOI
10.1126/science.1192739

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Understanding and mitigating decoherence is a key challenge for quantum science and technology. The main source of decoherence for solid-state spin systems is the uncontrolled spin bath environment. Here, we demonstrate quantum control of a mesoscopic spin bath in diamond at room temperature that is composed of electron spins of substitutional nitrogen impurities. The resulting spin bath dynamics are probed using a single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centre electron spin as a magnetic field sensor. We exploit the spin bath control to dynamically suppress dephasing of the NV spin by the spin bath. Furthermore, by combining spin bath control with dynamical decoupling, we directly measure the coherence and temporal correlations of different groups of bath spins. These results uncover a new arena for fundamental studies on decoherence and enable novel avenues for spin-based magnetometry and quantum information processing.
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We demonstrate significant improvements of the spin coherence time of a dense ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond through optimized dynamical decoupling (DD). Cooling the sample down to 77 K suppresses longitudinal spin relaxation T1{T}_{1}T1​ effects and DD microwave pulses are used to increase the transverse coherence time T2{T}_{2}T2​ from $\ensuremath{\sim}0.7\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}\mathrm{ms}$ up to $\ensuremath{\sim}30\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}\mathrm{ms}$. We extend previous work of single-axis (Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill) DD towards the preservation of arbitrary spin states. Following a theoretical and experimental characterization of pulse and detuning errors, we compare the performance of various DD protocols. We identify that the optimal control scheme for preserving an arbitrary spin state is a recursive protocol, the concatenated version of the XY8 pulse sequence. The improved spin coherence might have an immediate impact on improvements of the sensitivities of ac magnetometry. Moreover, the protocol can be used on denser diamond samples to increase coherence times up to NV-NV interaction time scales, a major step towards the creation of quantum collective NV spin states.
The decoherence of quantum objects is a critical issue in quantum science and technology. It is generally believed that stronger noise causes faster decoherence. Strikingly, recent theoretical work suggests that under certain conditions, the opposite is true for spins in quantum baths. Here we report an experimental observation of an anomalous decoherence effect for the electron spin-1 of a nitrogen-vacancy centre in high-purity diamond at room temperature. We demonstrate that, under dynamical decoupling, the double-transition can have longer coherence time than the single-transition even though the former couples to the nuclear spin bath as twice strongly as the latter does. The excellent agreement between the experimental and theoretical results confirms the controllability of the weakly coupled nuclear spins in the bath, which is useful in quantum information processing and quantum metrology. Quantum objects are subject to decoherence effects due to the surrounding environment. This study demonstrates experimentally a counterintuitive example of anomalous decoherence, in which electron spins residing at nitrogen vacancy centres in diamond display longer coherence times under stronger noises.
Dynamical decoupling (DD) and bath engineering are two parallel techniques employed to mitigate qubit decoherence resulting from their unavoidable coupling to the environment. Here, we present a hybrid DD approach that integrates pulsed DD with bath spin polarization to enhance qubit coherence within the central spin model. This model, which can be realized using GaAs semiconductor quantum dots or analogous quantum simulators, demonstrates a significant extension of the central spin's coherence time by approximately 2 to 3 orders of magnitude that compared with the free-induced decay time, where the dominant contribution from DD and a moderate improvement from spin-bath polarization. This study, which integrates uniaxial dynamical decoupling and auxiliary bath-spin engineering, paves the way for prolonging coherence times in various practical quantum systems, including GaAs/AlGaAs, silicon and Si/SiGe. And this advancement holds substantial promise for applications in quantum information processing.