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Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Coherence of group-IV color centers

Isaac Harris, Dirk Englund

Published Feb 14, 2024• 15 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Group-IV color centers in diamond are a promising platform for quantum entanglement distribution experiments. However, they suffer from a phonon-mediated decoherence mechanism that limits the maximum temperature at which they can operate. This theoretical work develops a model that accurately predicts coherence time, and further predicts regimes in which the coherence can be extended, potentially leading to higher-temperature operation.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.109.085414

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Group-IV color centers in diamond are a promising platform for quantum entanglement distribution experiments. However, they suffer from a phonon-mediated decoherence mechanism that limits the maximum temperature at which they can operate. This theoretical work develops a model that accurately predicts coherence time, and further predicts regimes in which the coherence can be extended, potentially leading to higher-temperature operation.
Group-IV color centers in diamond (SiV, GeV, SnV) have emerged as leading solid-state spin-photon interfaces for quantum information processing applications. However, these qubits require cryogenic temperatures to achieve high fidelity operation due to interactions with the thermal phonon bath. In this work, we: (i) derive a detailed model of the decoherence from first-order acoustic phonon processes acting on the spin-orbit fine structure of these color centers; (ii) demonstrate agreement of the model's predicted coherence times with previous measurements; (iii) identify regimes to suppress phonon-mediated decoherence by changing magnetic-field and strain bias to allow higher temperature operation. This methodology enables prediction of decoherence processes in other color centers and solid-state qubit systems coupled to a thermal bath via a parasitic two-level system. By experiment-anchored decoherence models, we facilitate optimizing qubit coherence for specific applications and devices.
Qubit coherence is an essential figure of merit for quantum information processing applications such as quantum computing, or quantum repeaters. Understanding the coherence properties of the underlying physical qubits that facilitate such applications is therefore are often limited by coupling to lattice phonons, which in turn constrains operation temperature. Here we study phonon induced electronic spin decoherence in group-IV vacancy centers in diamond. We begin by modeling the spin-phonon interaction and then employ the widely used Born-Markov approximation, highlighting its inconsistencies in this setting and its deviations from experimental observations. To close the gap between theoretical predictions and experimental results, we relax certain approximations, investigate their contributions to the predicted coherence times, and identify the dominant sources of discrepancy. We further demonstrate that experimentally measured electronic spin coherence dynamics are consistently captured within a non-Markovian framework, and we show how the magnetic field orientation influences the qubit coherence time.
Color centers in diamond are a promising platform for quantum communication, as they can serve as solid state quantum memories with efficient optical transitions. Much recent attention has focused on the negatively charged NV center in diamond, which has a spin triplet ground state electronic configuration that can be measured and initialized optically, exhibits long spin coherence times at room temperature, and has narrow, spin-conserving optical transitions. However, the NV center exhibits a large static and dynamic inhomogeneous linewidth, and over 97% of its emission is in a broad, incoherent phonon side band, severely limiting scalability. Alternatively, the negatively charged SiV center exhibits excellent optical properties, with 70% of its emission in the zero phonon line and a narrow inhomogeneous linewidth. However, SiV− suffers from short electron spin coherence times, limited by an orbital relaxation rate (T1) of around 40 ns at 5 K.
Color centers associated with group-IV dopants in diamond with long-lived nuclear spins have emerged as major candidates for distributed quantum computing nodes and quantum repeaters. Several proof-of-principle experiments have already been demonstrated. A key operation for long-distance entanglement-distribution protocols are fast and robust gates between the electron spin and a nuclear spin. Here, we investigate numerically for an existing experimental platform of a Germanium-vacancy (GeV) center with a strongly-coupled 13{}^{13}13C spin, how such gates can be implemented via quantum optimal control. In the presence of realistic noise we investigate different parameter regimes and gate operations and obtain robust two-qubit gates with fidelities exceeding 99.9%99.9 \%99.9%. The framework provides a scalable strategy for group-IV quantum nodes and can be adapted to related architectures.