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arXiv:2410.15210 · Physical Review Letters

Robust Noise Suppression and Quantum Sensing by Continuous Phased Dynamical Decoupling

Daniel Louzon, Genko T. Genov, Nicolas Staudenmaier, Florian Frank, Johannes Lang, Matthew Markham, Alex Retzker, Fedor Jelezko

Published Mar 26, 2025• 12 citations
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Abstract

We propose and demonstrate experimentally continuous phased dynamical decoupling (CPDD), where we apply a continuous field with discrete phase changes for quantum sensing and robust compensation of environmental and amplitude noise. CPDD does not use short pulses, making it particularly suitable for experiments with limited driving power or nuclear magnetic resonance at high magnetic fields. It requires control of the timing of the phase changes, offering much greater precision than the Rabi frequency control needed in standard continuous sensing schemes. We successfully apply our method to nanoscale nuclear magnetic resonance and combine it with quantum heterodyne detection, achieving microhertz uncertainty in the estimated signal frequency for a 120 s measurement. Our Letter expands significantly the applicability of dynamical decoupling and opens the door for a wide range of experiments, e.g., in nitrogen-vacancy centers, trapped ions, or trapped atoms.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.134.120802

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The loss of coherence is one of the main obstacles for the implementation of quantum information processing. The efficiency of dynamical decoupling schemes, which have been introduced to address this problem, is limited itself by the fluctuations in the driving fields which will themselves introduce noise. We address this challenge by introducing the concept of concatenated continuous dynamical decoupling, which can overcome not only external magnetic noise but also noise due to fluctuations in driving fields. We show theoretically that this approach can achieve relaxation limited coherence times, and demonstrate experimentally that already the most basic implementation of this concept yields an order of magnitude improvement to the decoherence time for the electron spin of nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond. The proposed scheme can be applied to a wide variety of other physical systems, including trapped atoms and ions and quantum dots, and may be combined with other quantum technologies challenges such as quantum sensing and quantum information processing.
We develop theoretically and demonstrate experimentally a universal dynamical decoupling method for robust quantum sensing with unambiguous signal identification. Our method uses randomization of control pulses to simultaneously suppress two types of errors in the measured spectra that would otherwise lead to false signal identification. These are spurious responses due to finite-width π pulses, as well as signal distortion caused by π pulse imperfections. For the cases of nanoscale nuclear-spin sensing and ac magnetometry, we benchmark the performance of the protocol with a single nitrogen vacancy center in diamond against widely used nonrandomized pulse sequences. Our method is general and can be combined with existing multipulse quantum sensing sequences to enhance their performance.
Abstract We propose a scheme for mixed dynamical decoupling (MDD), where we combine continuous dynamical decoupling with robust sequences of phased pulses. Specifically, we use two fields for decoupling, where the first continuous driving field creates dressed states that are robust to environmental noise. Then, a second field implements a robust sequence of phased pulses to perform inversions of the dressed qubits, thus achieving robustness to amplitude fluctuations of both fields. We show that MDD outperforms standard concatenated continuous dynamical decoupling in realistic numerical simulations for dynamical decoupling in NV centers in diamond. Finally, we also demonstrate how our technique can be utilized for improved sensing.
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Dynamical decoupling (DD) is an efficient method to decouple systems from environmental noise and to prolong the coherence time of systems. In contrast to discrete and continuous DD protocols in the presence of bias field, we propose a Floquet DD at zero bias to perfectly suppress both the zeroth and first orders of noises according to the Floquet theory. Specifically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this Floquet DD protocol in two typical systems including a spinor atomic Bose-Einstein condensate decohered by classical stray magnetic fields and a semiconductor quantum dot electron spin coupled to nuclear spins. Furthermore, our protocol can be used to sense high-frequency noises. The Floquet DD protocol we propose shines light on low-cost and highly portable DD technics without bias field and with low controlling power, which may have wide applications in quantum computing, quantum sensing, nuclear magnetic resonance, and magnetic resonance imaging.
Abstract By sequentially recording the phase of an AC signal relative to an external clock, quantum heterodyne schemes have recorded MHz and GHz signals with Fourier-limited precision. However, in systems with large inhomogeneous broadening, existing heterodyne protocols provide limited protection of the spin coherence, impacting amplitude sensitivity. Here, we use a continuous microwave scheme that extends spin coherence towards the effective T2≈12T1{T}_{2}\approx \frac{1}{2}{T}_{1}T2​≈21​T1​ T 2 ≈ 1 2 T 1 limit and resolves the frequency, amplitude and phase of MHz to GHz magnetic fields. In an ensemble of boron vacancies in hexagonal boron nitride the scheme achieves an amplitude sensitivity of η≈3−5 μT/Hz\eta \approx 3-5\,\mu {{{\rm{T}}}}/\sqrt{{{{\rm{Hz}}}}}η≈3−5μT/Hz​ η ≈ 3 − 5 μ T / Hz and phase sensitivity of ηϕ≈0.076 rads/Hz{\eta }_{\phi }\approx 0.076\,{{{\rm{rads}}}}/\sqrt{{{{\rm{Hz}}}}}ηϕ​≈0.076rads/Hz​ η ϕ ≈ 0.076 rads / Hz . We demonstrate that the scheme is compatible with quantum heterodyne detection, recording a GHz signal with a resolution < 1 Hz and SNR of 235 over a 10 s measurement. Achieving this performance in a two-dimensional material platform could have broad applications in probing nanoscale condensed matter systems.