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arXiv:1207.5729 · Physical Review A

Continuous dynamical decoupling magnetometry

Masashi Hirose, Clarice D. Aiello, Paola Cappellaro

Published Dec 20, 2012• 65 citations
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Abstract

Solid-state qubits hold the promise to achieve an unmatched combination of sensitivity and spatial resolution. To achieve their potential, the qubits need, however, to be shielded from the deleterious effects of the environment. While dynamical decoupling techniques can improve the coherence time, they impose a compromise between sensitivity and the frequency range of the field to be measured. Moreover, the performance of pulse sequences is ultimately limited by control bounds and errors. Here we analyze a versatile alternative based on continuous driving. We find that continuous dynamical decoupling schemes can be used for ac magnetometry, providing similar frequency constraints on the ac field and improved sensitivity for some noise regimes. In addition, the flexibility of phase and amplitude modulation could yield superior robustness to driving errors and a better adaptability to external experimental scenarios.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.86.062320

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•Jan 1, 2018•10 citations
Solid-state qubits hold the promise to achieve an unmatched combination of sensitivity and spatial resolution. To achieve their potential, the qubits need, however, to be shielded from the deleterious effects of the environment. While dynamical decoupling techniques can improve the coherence time, they impose a compromise between sensitivity and the frequency range of the field to be measured. Moreover, the performance of pulse sequences is ultimately limited by control bounds and errors. Here we analyze a versatile alternative based on continuous driving. We find that continuous dynamical decoupling schemes can be used for ac magnetometry, providing similar frequency constraints on the ac field and improved sensitivity for some noise regimes. In addition, the flexibility of phase and amplitude modulation could yield superior robustness to driving errors and a better adaptability to external experimental scenarios.
Magnetometry utilizing a spin qubit in a solid state possesses high sensitivity. In particular, a magnetic sensor with a high spatial resolution can be achieved with the electron-spin states of a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in the diamond. In this study, we demonstrated that NV quantum sensing based on multiple-pulse decoupling sequences can sensitively measure not only the amplitude but also the phase shift of an alternating-current (AC) magnetic field. In the AC magnetometry based on decoupling sequences, the maximum phase accumulation of the NV spin due to an AC-field can be generally obtained when the π-pulse period in the sequences matches the half time period of the field and the relative phase difference between the sequences and the field is zero. By contrast, the NV quantum sensor acquires no phase accumulation if the relative phase difference is π/2. Thus, this phase-accumulation condition does not have any advantage for the magnetometry. However, we revealed that the nonphase-accumulation condition is available for detecting a very small phase shift of an AC-field from its initial phase. Measurements of the real part and the imaginary part of AC impedance require the amplitude and the phase information of an AC-field, and thus, this finding is expected to provide a guide for realizing sensitive measurement of AC impedance in the micrometer and nanometer scales.
Dynamical decoupling sequences of multiple pulses offer filter functions for the time evolution of a qubit superposition state, and thus are indispensable tools for quantum sensing. The authors investigate the effects of sequences of finite-width pulses on ac magnetometry based on nitrogen-vacancy centers in isotopically controlled diamond. This experimental and theoretical study shows that finite pulse width alters the optimum acquisition time, and shows how to correct the resulting frequency shift, providing a guideline for accurate measurement of the frequency, linewidth, and amplitude of an ac field.
Subpicotesla level magnetometry has been demonstrated using negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy ( N − V ) centers in diamond by increasing the number of spins simultaneously used for sensing in an N − V ensemble. However, such scale-up often introduces spatial inhomogeneities in detuning and control field amplitudes, which degrade sensitivity. Although several techniques have been utilized to overcome these challenges, including pulsed dynamical decoupling or shaped pulses, these are not generally compatible with the current state-of-the-art techniques for GHz-range ac magnetometry with N − V ensembles, which are typically based on Rabi oscillations. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate GHz-range ac magnetometry using a large ensemble of N − V centers under spatially inhomogeneous drive fields by employing concatenated continuous dynamical decoupling, which is designed for robustness against such imperfections. We compare its performance with the conventional direct Rabi method and show that the robust dressed states in our method extend significantly the measuring range to weaker signals in GHz-range ac magnetometry.
The coherence times achieved with continuous dynamical decoupling techniques are often limited by fluctuations in the driving amplitude. In this work, we use time-dependent phase-modulated continuous driving to increase the robustness against such fluctuations in a dense ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond. Considering realistic experimental errors in the system, we identify the optimal modulation strength and demonstrate an improvement of an order of magnitude in the spin preservation of arbitrary states over conventional single continuous driving. The phase-modulated driving exhibits results comparable to those found with previously examined amplitude-modulated techniques and is expected to outperform them in experimental systems having higher phase accuracy. The proposed technique could open new avenues for quantum information processing and many-body physics in systems dominated by high-frequency spin-bath noise, for which pulsed dynamical decoupling is less effective.
We propose a magnetometer for the precise measurement of AC magnetic fields that uses a Terbium-doped optical fiber with half-waveplates built into it at specified distances. Our scheme uses an open-loop quantum control technique called dynamical decoupling to reduce the noise floor and thus increase the sensitivity. We show that dynamical decoupling is extremely effective in preserving the photon state evolution due to the external AC magnetic field from random birefringence in the fiber, even when accounting for errors in pulse timing. Hence we achieve high sensitivity. For a given inter-waveplate distance, the minimum detectable field is inversely proportional to fiber length, as is the bandwidth of detectable frequencies.
Ensembles of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond are widely used as AC magnetometers. While such measurements are usually performed using standard (XY) dynamical decoupling (DD) protocols at room temperature, we study the sensitivities achieved by utilizing various DD protocols, for measuring magnetic AC fields at frequencies in the 10-250 kHz range, at room temperature and 77 K. By performing measurements on an isotopically pure 12^{12}12C sample, we find that the Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill (CPMG) protocol, which is not robust against pulse imperfections, is less efficient for magnetometry than robust XY-based sequences. The concatenation of a standard XY-based protocol may enhance the sensitivities only for measuring high-frequency fields, for which many (>500> 500>500) DD pulses are necessary and the robustness against pulse imperfections is critical. Moreover, we show that cooling is effective only for measuring low-frequency fields (~10 kHz), for which the experiment time apporaches T1T_1T1​ at a small number of applied DD pulses.