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Physical Review Applied

Photon-emission statistics for single nitrogen-vacancy centers

Iván Panadero, Hilario Espinós, Lucas Tsunaki, Kseniia Volkova, Ander Tobalina, Jorge Casanova, Pablo Acedo, Boris Naydenov, Ricardo Puebla, E. Torrontegui

Published Jul 15, 2024• 15 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We model and experimentally demonstrate the full time-dependent counting statistics of photons emitted by a single nitrogen-vacancy ($\mathrm{N}$-$V$) center in diamond under nonresonant laser excitation and resonant microwave control. A generalization of the quantum jump formalism for the seven electronic states involved in the fast intrinsic dynamics of a $\mathrm{N}$-$V$ center provides a self-contained model that allows the characterization of its emission and clarifies the relation between the internal states of the $\mathrm{N}$-$V$ center and the measurable detected photon counts. The model allows the elaboration of detection protocols to optimize the energy and time resources while maximizing the system sensitivity to magnetic field measurements.

DOI
10.1103/physrevapplied.22.014035

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We model and experimentally demonstrate the full time-dependent counting statistics of photons emitted by a single nitrogen-vacancy (N\mathrm{N}N-VVV) center in diamond under nonresonant laser excitation and resonant microwave control. A generalization of the quantum jump formalism for the seven electronic states involved in the fast intrinsic dynamics of a N\mathrm{N}N-VVV center provides a self-contained model that allows the characterization of its emission and clarifies the relation between the internal states of the N\mathrm{N}N-VVV center and the measurable detected photon counts. The model allows the elaboration of detection protocols to optimize the energy and time resources while maximizing the system sensitivity to magnetic field measurements.
We model and experimentally demonstrate the full time-dependent counting statistics of photons emitted by a single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond under non-resonant laser excitation and resonant microwave control. A generalization of the quantum jump formalism for the seven electronic states involved in the fast intrinsic dynamics of an NV center provides a self-contained model that allows for the characterization of its emission and clarifies the relation between the quantum system internal states and the measurable detected photon counts. The model allows the elaboration of detection protocols to optimize the energy and time resources while maximizing the system sensitivity to magnetic-field measurements.
We analyze the full counting statistics of photons emitted by a Nitrogen Vacancy center (NV) under non-resonant laser excitation and resonant micro-wave (MW) control. This allows to build a phenomenological model which relates the relevant physical parameters with the detected fluorescence. Furthermore, we can investigate the time correlations of the emitted photons and elaborate detection and polarization protocols to optimize the energy and time resources while maximizing the system sensitivity.
The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center is a defect in the structure of diamond, roughly the size of a single atom, that possesses properties that make it applicable to quantum information processing, high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging, and probing biological systems. When an NV center is excited by green light of wavelength 523 nm, it emits red light of in the range from 600-800 nm tens of nanoseconds later. A confocal microscope can be used to excite and collect emitted photons from NV centers. By detecting the intensity of the emitted red photons, we can determine the quantum state of a single NV center, which is needed to build various quantum computing, sensing and imaging devices. The autocorrelation method is used to detect antibunching in the emission of red photons and ascertain that the observed photons are being emitted from a single NV center. We have built an autocorrelation device that measures, with sub-nanosecond accuracy, the statistical distribution of the arrival times of the red photons emitted from a diamond sample at a photon counter. The device can measure fixed time values with a time resolution of 120 ps FWHM. For uncorrelated sources measured for 120 seconds at the TAC full range of 100 ns, the average counts in each histogram bin were about 0.01% of the predicted value. The autocorrelation device that we have built costs about 10 times less than commercial units used by other NV researchers.
Abstract Multiple-microwave-photon transition is a nonlinear process involving the simultaneous absorption of multiple microwave photons to reach a higher energy state. This phenomenon enables microwave frequency conversion, a crucial technique for spin-wave devices, frequency synthesizers and communication devices. However, it has not been observed in nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamonds, which serve as a key quantum platform linking flying qubits, microwave photons, and solid-state spins. In this work, we first observed multiple-microwave-photon transitions in NV centers in diamonds, using optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) methods with a single laser and microwave beam. We demonstrate that microwave frequencies, effective g-factor, and angular momentum exhibit a 1/n scaling law, but the linewidth exhibits a 1/n^2 scaling law for n-photon transitions between the ground states. Additionally, we detect the hyperfine structure of the ground states and achieve coherent spin manipulation under multi-photon excitation. Our findings offer a novel approach for the precise manipulation of NV center spin states, advancing quantum sensing and quantum information.
We propose a scheme for detecting single microwave photons using dipole-induced transparency (DIT) in an optical cavity resonantly coupled to a spin-selective transition of a negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy (NV−) defect in diamond crystal lattices. In this scheme, the microwave photons control the interaction of the optical cavity with the NV− center by addressing the spin state of the defect. The spin, in turn, is measured with high fidelity by counting the number of reflected photons when the cavity is probed by resonant laser light. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, we derive the governing master equation and solve it through both direct integration and the Monte Carlo approach. Using these numerical simulations, we then investigate the effects of different parameters on the detection performance and find their corresponding optimized values. Our results indicate that detection efficiencies approaching 90% and fidelities exceeding 90% could be achieved when using realistic optical and microwave cavity parameters.