Quantum science with spin impurities in diamond

G. de Lange, Toeno van der Sar, Machiel Blok +3 more

Understanding and mitigating decoherence is a key challenge for quantum science and technology. The main source of decoherence for solid-state spin systems is the uncontrolled spin bath environment. Here, we demonstrate quantum control of a mesoscopic spin bath in diamond at room temperature that is composed of electron spins of substitutional nitrogen impurities. The resulting spin bath dynamics are probed using a single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centre electron spin as a magnetic field sensor. We exploit the spin bath control to dynamically suppress dephasing of the NV spin by the spin bath. Furthermore, by combining spin bath control with dynamical decoupling, we directly measure the coherence and temporal correlations of different groups of bath spins. These results uncover a new arena for fundamental studies on decoherence and enable novel avenues for spin-based magnetometry and quantum information processing.

D.M. Toyli

Jörg Wrachtrup

Saulo L. L. Silva, Moisés Rojas

In this work we analyze the quantum correlations in a spin-1/2 Ising-XXZ diamond chain with one plaquette distorted impurity. We have shown that the introduction of impurity into the chain can significantly increase entanglement as well as quantum correlations compared to the original model, without impurity. Due to the great flexibility in the choice of impurity parameters, the model presented is very general and this fact can be very useful for future experimental measurements. In addition to entanglement and quantum coherence, we studied quantum teleportation through a quantum channel composed by a coupled of Heisenberg dimers with distorted impurity in an Ising-XXZ diamond chain, as well as fidelity in teleportation. Our analysis shows that the appropriate choice of parameters can greatly increase all the measures analyzed. For comparison purposes, we present all our results together with the results of the measurements made for the original model, without impurity, studied in previous works.

Philip F. Schewe

Thomas Chanier, Craig Pryor, Michael E. Flatté

The electronic and magnetic properties of a neutral substitutional nickel (Ni 0 s ) impurity in diamond are studied using density functional theory in the generalized gradient approximation. The spin-one ground state consists of two electrons with parallel spins, one located on the nickel ion in a 3 d 9 configuration and the other distributed among the nearest-neighbor carbons. The exchange interaction between these spins is due to p - d hybridization and is controllable with compressive hydrostatic or uniaxial strain, and for sufficient strain the antiparallel spin configuration becomes the ground state. Hence, the Ni impurity forms a controllable two-electron exchange-coupled system that should be a robust qubit for solid-state quantum information processing.