Control and coupling of individual quantum systems remains an important research area in experimental quantum information. Single quantum systems in the solid state offer many attractive properties in terms of isolation and control: strong interaction due to close proximity, and scalability using mature fabrication techniques. Similar to atoms, many solid state quantum systems can couple to photons, offering potential for long-range interaction. Two such candidate systems are the nitrogen vacancy center in diamond, and the nanowire semiconductor quantum dot. These systems can act like isolated atoms in a solid state system, and can serve as sources of indistinguishable photons. This report discusses low temperature excitation of these systems, a regime in which the spectral properties are desirable for applications in quantum information, such as long-distance entanglement.
Control and coupling of individual quantum systems remains an important research area in experimental quantum information. Single quantum systems in the solid state offer many attractive properties in terms of isolation and control: strong interaction due to close proximity, and scalability using mature fabrication techniques. Similar to atoms, many solid state quantum systems can couple to photons, offering potential for long-range interaction. Two such candidate systems are the nitrogen vacancy center in diamond, and the nanowire semiconductor quantum dot. These systems can act like isolated atoms in a solid state system, and can serve as sources of indistinguishable photons. This report discusses low temperature excitation of these systems, a regime in which the spectral properties are desirable for applications in quantum information, such as long-distance entanglement.
The controlled, coherent manipulation of quantum-mechanical systems is an important challenge in modern science and engineering, with significant applications in quantum information science. Solid-state quantum systems such as electronic spins, nuclear spins, and superconducting islands are among the most promising candidates for realization of quantum bits (qubits). However, in contrast to isolated atomic systems, these solid-state qubits couple to a complex environment which often results in rapid loss of coherence, and, in general, is difficult to understand. Additionally, the strong interactions which make solid-state quantum systems attractive can typically only occur between neighboring systems, leading to difficulties in coupling arbitrary pairs of quantum bits. This thesis presents experimental progress in understanding and controlling the complex environment of a solid-state quantum bit, and theoretical techniques for extending the distance over which certain quantum bits can interact coherently. Coherent manipulation of an individual electron spin associated with a nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond is used to gain insight into its mesoscopic environment. Furthermore, techniques for exploiting coherent interactions between the electron spin and a subset of the environment are developed and demonstrated, leading to controlled
General requirements for single-photon devices in various applications are presented and compared with experimental progress to date. The quantum information applications that currently appear the most promising require a matter qubit-enabled single-photon source, where the emitted photon state is linked to the state of a long-lived quantum system such as an electron spin. The nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond is a promising solid-state system for realizing such a device due to its long-lived electron spin coherence, optical addressability, and ability to couple to a manageable number of nuclear spins. This system is discussed in detail, and experimental results from our laboratory are shown. A critical component of such a device is an optical microcavity to enhance the coupling between the nitrogen-vacancy center and a single photon, and we discuss theoretically the requirements for achieving this enhancement.
The complex environment of solid-state quantum bits is generally believed to pose a difficult challenge for solid state realizations of quantum information science. Close study of single electronic spins associated with the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond has shown how a complex environment -- in this case a spin-bath formed by carbon-13 isotopic impurities -- may be understood and even controlled. Specifically, we show that optical and microwave excitation of the NV center can be used to perform robust initialization, manipulation, and measurement of the two-qubit register formed by the electronic spin and its nearest-neighbor carbon-13 nuclear spin. These few-qubit registers may be used as a basis for scalable quantum information systems provided that one can identify a means to connect different registers. For an optically active system such as the NV center, photons provide a natural medium for inter- register communication, and we discuss initial experiments studying the possibility of quantum optical interconnects. Such an optically-connected few-qubit register offers a flexible hardware for both quantum computation and long-distance quantum communication; in particular, it may allow realization of a solid-state quantum repeater.
Single semiconductor quantum dots, which are considered as two-level systems in the artificial atom model, are promising structures for the realization of integrated devices such as single photon sources for quantum information applications. However, contrary to genuine atoms, they are condensed matter systems which suffer from the coupling to their solid environment, leading to a degradation of the coherence of the emitted photons. One possibility to avoid this coupling, thereby improving the coherence of the photons until the one imposed by the radiative limit T2 = 2T1, is to perform strictly resonant excitation of a quantum dot at low temperature. Using an experimental setup that spatially decouples the excitation and detection paths, we showed that a fine control of the electrostatic environment related to the nanostructures residual doping remains a major challenge to answer the widely encountered problem of the inhibition of the resonance fluorescence of a quantum dot. Meanwhile, thanks to quantum optics experiments and high resolution optical spectroscopy, we demonstrated that the resonant Rayleigh scattering regime where quantum dots emit single photons with the laser coherence time, paves the way to the development of "ultra-coherent" sources of single photons with high degrees of indistinguishability. In this regime where the laser tailors the coherence of the photons and where the radiative limit becomes a secondary requirement, two photons emitted successively by the same quantum dot are indistinguishable on time scales never obtained before for a solid nano-emitter (up to ten nanoseconds, comparing to the carriers lifetime and decoherence time of about a hundred of picoseconds).
Abstract A common theme in the implementation of quantum technologies involves addressing the seemingly contradictory needs for controllability and isolation from external effects. Undesirable effects of the environment must be minimized, while at the same time techniques and tools must be developed that enable interaction with the system in a controllable and well-defined manner. This chapter addresses several aspects of this theme with regard to a particularly promising candidate for developing applications in both metrology and quantum information, namely the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centre in diamond. The chapter describes how the quantum states of NV centres can be manipulated, probed, and efficiently coupled with optical photons. It also discusses ways of tackling the challenges of controlling the optical properties of these emitters inside a complex solid state environment.
This work investigates the applicability of the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) defect center in diamond for quantum computation and metrology purposes. The NV center is a molecule like defect in the diamond lattice which is optically active and possesses an electron spin in its ground state. The spin can be used as a quantum bit and as a field sensor. The NV center has three major properties enabling individual control of single defects. Its optical properties depend on the spin state, the spin can be polarized optically and the spin state has an exceptionally long lifetime. Single NV centers can be controlled by optical and microwave radiation. Generally, the research on individually controllable quantum systems is not only motivated by quantum computation and communication. With the ongoing miniaturization nowadays electronic and electro-optic devices will soon reach the limit of single quantum building blocks. While in these applications the full complexity of single quantum systems might not be needed, small sensors based on single atoms or molecules might very well take advantage of the susceptibility of quantum coherences to environmental conditions. Major challenges for all approaches towards single quantum system control are the individual addressing, the measurement of the quantum state and the protection of quantum coherence from environmental noise. Today, there is a variety of systems (including the NV center) that allow control on the single quantum level. These are for example single photons, single ions and atoms in traps, single spins in semiconductors or single molecules in solid state systems. Rather mesoscopic examples are superconducting devices, nanomechanical oscillators or surface plasmon polaritons. Regarding the NV center it has been shown that the magnetic moment of its electron spin allows individual sensing and coupling to other surrounding electron and nuclear spins. Especially single nuclear spins were shown to be exceptional quantum memories. In this work small quantum registers of up to 5 spins have been used to test major requirements for a feasible quantum processor. Therefore, mainly artificially created high purity diamond samples with controlled spin and impurity concentration were used. The NV centers were either grown in or created via ion implantation techniques in a controlled fashion. As a first requirement for quantum computation entanglement among up to three spins has been generated and was verified by quantum state tomography. This proves the access of the full Hilbert space. Especially, entanglement among nuclear spins was very long-living. In further experiments this processor was used for first quantum algorithms like super-dense coding and the Deutsch algorithm. In addition, this work demonstrates new methods to initialize nuclear spin qubits into a desired quantum state. This is particularly important as improper initialization inhibits quantum computation. One of these methods is related to dynamic nuclear spin polarization and the other to measurement based state preparation. Nuclear spins in the diamond lattice originate mainly from the C-13 isotope. By artificially altering its content the influence on the NV center spin was investigated. The coherence times of the NV center were increasing inversely with the nuclear spin density. Even increasing nuclear spin density to offer more nuclear spin qubits to an operational quantum register was possible. As an alternative route of scaling up the quantum register pairs of closely spaced NV centers were investigated. For the first time two qubit gates among two NV centers mediated by magnetic dipolar coupling have been realized. Furthermore the sensing ability was demonstrated by measuring the relative distance of the two centers (10 nm) with sub-nm precision. Eventually, this work contains new insight into the electronically excited state of the NV center which allowed a more advanced control of the electron and nuclear spins. A comparably high magnetic field was used to decouple electron and nuclear spins. Finally, this allowed quantum nondemolition measurements on single nuclear spins which manifests in the observation of quantum jumps. The new insight was used to drastically improve the performance of quantum state readout. Summarizing, it was shown that single NV centers and proximal nuclear spins form versatile small quantum registers which can be interconnected with neighboring such NV quantum registers. Although the number of qubits used in this work is still small the experimental results propose a way of how to proceed when building a quantum computer. Regarding quantum metrology, however, the use of such a small register which can sense fields and store and process the results would already outperform a single NV electron spin by orders of magnitude.