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Quantum Computing, Communication, and Simulation

Optomechanical driving of spins

Prasoon Kumar Shandilya, David P. Lake, Matthew Mitchell, Денис Дмитриевич Сукачев, Paul E. Barclay

Published Mar 4, 2021• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum networks enable a broad range of practical and fundamental applications. Experimental realization of such networks is hampered by many challenges, one of them being a lack of an efficient interface between stationary and flying qubits working at room temperature. We demonstrate an interface between ensembles of the nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond and photons with wavelengths near 1550 nm. Photons are coupled to spins via local dynamical stress produced by optomechanical driving of a diamond microdisk. Our approach does not involve intrinsic optical transitions and can be easily adapted to many other colour centers.

DOI
10.1117/12.2582902

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Quantum networks enable a broad range of practical and fundamental applications. Experimental realization of such networks is hampered by many challenges, one of them being a lack of an efficient interface between stationary and flying qubits working at room temperature. We demonstrate an interface between ensembles of the nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond and photons with wavelengths near 1550 nm. Photons are coupled to spins via local dynamical stress produced by optomechanical driving of a diamond microdisk. Our approach does not involve intrinsic optical transitions and can be easily adapted to many other colour centers.
The Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) centre in diamond possesses an optical read out of its spin state and shows great promise for applications in solid state quantum technologies. Its broad phonon assisted emission spectrum, with only 4% of emission from the zero-phonon line, is a major drawback to this. The optical microcavity will be essential in efficiently interfacing these centres with photonic networks. Here we present investigations into the coupling of NV centres in nanodiamond to tunable open-microcavities, both at room temperature and at cryogenic temperatures. These structures will be shown to achieve good photon confinement, with mode volumes down to 5λ3. Room temperature studies on ensembles of NVs will illustrate the tunable spectral and spatial overlap between the emitter and the cavity mode. It will be shown that small enhancements are possible in this regime. After the preparation and characterisation of single emitters, low temperature coupling to the narrowed zero-phonon line will be the central theme of this thesis. Single photon emission into the cavity mode is verified. We observe the enhancement of the light-matter interaction in this regime, by a 39% increase in the emission rate when cavity-coupled, with the dependence on mode volume also demonstrated. These results are important for the realisation of a spin-photon interface in scalable quantum networks.
The Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) centre in diamond possesses an optical read out of its spin state and shows great promise for applications in solid state quantum technologies. Its broad phonon assisted emission spectrum, with only 4p of emission from the zero-phonon line, is a major drawback to this. The optical microcavity will be essential in efficiently interfacing these centres with photonic networks. Here we present investigations into the coupling of NV centres in nanodiamond to tunable open-microcavities, both at room temperature and at cryogenic temperatures. These structures will be shown to achieve good photon confinement, with mode volumes down to 5λ3. Room temperature studies on ensembles of NVs will illustrate the tunable spectral and spatial overlap between the emitter and the cavity mode. It will be shown that small enhancements are possible in this regime. After the preparation and characterisation of single emitters, low temperature coupling to the narrowed zero-phonon line will be the central theme of this thesis. Single photon emission into the cavity mode is verified. We observe the enhancement of the light-matter interaction in this regime, by a 39p increase in the emission rate when cavity-coupled, with the dependence on mode volume also demonstrated. These results are important for the realisation of a spin-photon interface in scalable quantum networks.
Efficient interfaces between optical photons and quantum bits are fundamental building blocks for quantum networks and large-scale quantum computers. We demonstrate an integrated platform for scalable quantum optics based on color centers coupled to diamond nanodevices. First, we incorporate nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond into hybrid nanophotonic crystal cavities. Despite our progress towards coupling the NV to cavity photons, we find that the NV-cavity interface is limited by the imperfections of the color center's properties and its local environment. We approach this challenge first by characterizing and modifying the diamond surface to reduce the environmental noise affecting the NV optical transition. Subsequently, we develop a new approach that makes use of a quantum emitter with intrinsic protection from this noise: the silicon-vacancy (SiV) center in diamond. We demonstrate that SiV centers introduced through ion implantation feature highly coherent optical transitions, even inside nanostructures. By placing SiV centers inside all-diamond photonic crystal cavities, we achieve strong SiV-photon coupling with a cooperativity of greater than 20. Using this platform, we realize a quantum-optical switch controlled by the spin degree of freedom of a single SiV. By measuring intensity correlations of indistinguishable Raman photons emitted into a single waveguide, we observe a quantum interference effect resulting from the superradiant emission of two probabilistically entangled SiV centers. Finally, we demonstrate controllable photon-mediated interactions between the spin degrees of freedom of two cavity-coupled SiV centers. When the optical transitions of the two SiV centers are tuned into resonance, the coupling of each SiV to the common cavity mode results in a coherent interaction between the two SiVs, leading to the observation of super- and sub-radiant two-SiV states.
Nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond typically have spin-conserving optical transitions, a feature which allows for optical detection of the long-lived electronic spin states through fluorescence detection. However, by applying stress to a sample it is possible to obtain spin-nonconserving transitions in which a single excited state couples to multiple ground states. Here we describe two-frequency optical spectroscopy on single nitrogen-vacancy centers in a high-purity diamond sample at low temperature. When stress is applied to the sample it is possible to observe coherent population trapping with a single center. By adjusting the stress it is possible to obtain a situation in which all of the transitions from the three ground sublevels to a common excited state are strongly allowed. These results show that all-optical spin manipulation is possible for this system, and we propose that that by coupling single centers to optical microcavities, a scalable quantum network could be realized for photonic quantum information processing.
The implementation of quantum networks involving quantum memories and photonic channels without the need for cryogenics would be a major technological breakthrough. Nitrogen-vacancy centers have excellent spin properties even at room temperature, but phonon-induced broadening makes it challenging to coherently interface these spins with photons at noncryogenic temperatures. Inspired by recent progress in achieving high mechanical quality factors, we propose that this challenge can be overcome using spin-optomechanical transduction. We quantify the coherence of the interface by calculating the indistinguishability and single-photon purity of photons emitted from such a device and describe promising paths towards experimental implementation. Our results show that for ultrahigh mechanical quality factor frequency products, as have recently been achieved, our proposed interface could generate single photons with high indistinguishability and efficiency without cryogenic cooling, an important step towards room-temperature quantum networks.
Candidate platforms in the global endeavour to build long distance quantum networks need to satisfy a variety of properties to act as a network node. These include - interfacing between stationary spins and photonic flying qubits, long quantum memory times, indistinguishable photons and a large photon flux. Cavities operating in the weak coupling regime offer the advantages that the spontaneous emission rate of the emitter is enhanced while the loss rate from the cavity is also high. With optimized output couplers, this results in an increased photon extraction efficiency and the proportion of coherent photons is also improved. Cavity-coupled Nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond (NV) fulfill most of these criteria with one weakness remaining - sensitivity to electronic noise [1]–[3].