Decoherence of two entangled spin qubits coupled to an interacting sparse nuclear spin bath: Application to nitrogen vacancy centers

Abstract

We consider pure dephasing of Bell states of electron spin qubits interacting with a sparse bath of nuclear spins. Using the newly developed two-qubit generalization of cluster-correlation expansion method, we calculate the spin-echo decay of $|\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Psi}}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ and $|\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Phi}}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ states for various interqubit distances. Comparing the results with calculations in which dephasing of each qubit is treated independently, we identify signatures of influence of common part of the bath on the two qubits. At large interqubit distances, this common part consists of many nuclei weakly coupled to both qubits, so that decoherence caused by it can be modeled by considering multiple uncorrelated sources of noise (clusters of nuclei), each of them weakly affecting the qubits. Consequently, the resulting genuinely two-qubit contribution to decoherence can be described as being caused by classical Gaussian noise. On the other hand, for small interqubit distances the common part of the environment contains clusters of spins that are strongly coupled to both qubits, and their contribution to two-qubit dephasing has visibly non-Gaussian character. We show that one can easily obtain information about non-Gaussianity of environmental noise affecting the qubits from the comparison of dephasing of $|\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Psi}}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ and $|\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Phi}}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ Bell states. Numerical results are obtained for two nitrogen vacancy centers interacting with a bath of $^{13}\mathrm{C}$ nuclei of natural concentration, for which we obtain that Gaussian description of a correlated part of environmental noise starts to hold for centers separated by about 3 nm.