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arXiv:1705.07968 · Physical Review Letters

High-Resolution Quantum Sensing with Shaped Control Pulses

Jonathan Zopes, Kento Sasaki, K. S. Cujia, J. M. Boss, K. Chang, Takuya F. Segawa, Kohei M. Itoh, Christian L. Degen

Published Dec 28, 2017• 36 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We investigate the application of amplitude-shaped control pulses for enhancing the time and frequency resolution of multipulse quantum sensing sequences. Using the electronic spin of a single nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond and up to 10 000 coherent microwave pulses with a cosine square envelope, we demonstrate 0.6-ps timing resolution for the interpulse delay. This represents a refinement by over 3 orders of magnitude compared to the 2-ns hardware sampling. We apply the method for the detection of external ac magnetic fields and nuclear magnetic resonance signals of ^{13}C spins with high spectral resolution. Our method is simple to implement and especially useful for quantum applications that require fast phase gates, many control pulses, and high fidelity.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.119.260501

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We investigate the application of amplitude-shaped control pulses for enhancing the time and frequency resolution of multipulse quantum sensing sequences. Using the electronic spin of a single nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond and up to 10 000 coherent microwave pulses with a cosine square envelope, we demonstrate 0.6-ps timing resolution for the interpulse delay. This represents a refinement by over 3 orders of magnitude compared to the 2-ns hardware sampling. We apply the method for the detection of external ac magnetic fields and nuclear magnetic resonance signals of ^{13}C spins with high spectral resolution. Our method is simple to implement and especially useful for quantum applications that require fast phase gates, many control pulses, and high fidelity.
Quantum systems composed of solid-state electronic spins can be sensitive detectors of narrowband magnetic fields. A prominent example is the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond, which has been employed for magnetic spectroscopy with high spatial and spectral resolution. However, NV-diamond spectroscopy protocols are typically based on dynamical decoupling sequences, which are limited to low-frequency signals ( ≲ 20 MHz) due to the technical requirements on microwave (MW) pulses used to manipulate NV electronic spins. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate a high-resolution magnetic spectroscopy protocol that integrates a quantum frequency mixing (QFM) effect in a dense NV ensemble with coherently averaged synchronized readout (CASR) to provide both a wide range of signal frequency detection and sub-Hz spectral resolution. We assess the sensitivity of this QFM-CASR protocol across a frequency range of 10 MHz to 4 GHz. By measuring the spectra of multi-frequency signals near 0.6, 2.4 and 4 GHz, we demonstrate sub-Hz spectral resolution with a nT-scale noise floor for the target signal, and precise phase measurement with error < 1 ∘ . Compared to state-of-the-art NV-diamond techniques for high-resolution magnetic spectroscopy, the QFM-CASR protocol extends the signal frequency range by more than an order of magnitude, enabling applications in radio frequency (RF) and MW signal microscopy and analysis, as well as tesla-scale nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy of small samples.
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Abstract Quantum systems composed of solid-state electronic spins can be sensitive detectors of narrowband magnetic fields. A prominent example is the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond, which has been employed for magnetic spectroscopy with high spatial and spectral resolution. However, NV-diamond spectroscopy protocols are typically based on dynamical decoupling sequences, which are limited to low-frequency signals (≲ 20 MHz) due to the technical requirements on microwave (MW) pulses used to manipulate NV electronic spins. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate a high-resolution magnetic spectroscopy protocol that integrates a quantum frequency mixing (QFM) effect in a dense NV ensemble with coherently averaged synchronized readout (CASR) to provide both a wide range of signal frequency detection and sub-Hz spectral resolution. We assess the sensitivity of this QFM-CASR protocol across a frequency range of 10 MHz to 4 GHz. By measuring the spectra of multi-frequency signals near 0.6, 2.4 and 4 GHz, we demonstrate sub-Hz spectral resolution with a nT-scale noise floor for the target signal, and precise phase measurement with error <1°. Compared to state-of-the-art NV-diamond techniques for narrowband magnetic spectroscopy, the QFM-CASR protocol greatly extends the detectable frequency range, enabling applications in high-frequency radio frequency (RF) and MW signal microscopy and analysis, as well as tesla-scale nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy of small samples.
We discuss multipulse magnetometry that exploits all three magnetic sublevels of the S=1 nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond to achieve enhanced magnetic field sensitivity. Based on dual frequency microwave pulsing, the scheme is twice as sensitive to ac magnetic fields as conventional two-level magnetometry. We derive the spin evolution operator for dual frequency microwave excitation and show its effectiveness for double-quantum state swaps. Using multipulse sequences of up to 128 pulses under optimized conditions, we show enhancement of the SNR by up to a factor of 2 in detecting NMR statistical signals, with a 4× enhancement theoretically possible.
We realize a two-qubit sensor designed for achieving high spectral resolution in quantum sensing experiments. Our sensor consists of an active "sensing qubit" and a long-lived "memory qubit", implemented by the electronic and the nitrogen-15 nuclear spins of a nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond, respectively. Using state storage times of up to 45 ms, we demonstrate spectroscopy of external ac signals with a line width of 19 Hz (~2.9 ppm) and of carbon-13 nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signals with a line width of 190 Hz (~ 74 ppm). This represents an up to 100-fold improvement in spectral resolution compared to measurements without nuclear memory.