Nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond are a solid-state analogue of trapped atoms, with fine structure in both the ground and excited states that may be used for advanced quantum control. These centres are promising candidates for spin-based quantum information processing1-3 and magnetometry 4-6 at room temperature. Knowledge of the excited-state (ES) structure and coherence is critical to evaluating the ES as a room-temperature quantum resource, for example for a fast, optically gated swap operation with a nuclear-spin memory 7 . Here we report experiments that probe the ES-spin coherence of single nitrogen-vacancy centres. Using a combination of pulsed-laser excitation and nanosecond-scale microwave manipulation, we observed ES Rabi oscillations, and multipulse resonant control enabled us to study coherent ES electron/nuclear-spin interactions. To understand these processes, we developed a finite-temperature theory of ES spin dynamics that also provides a pathway towards engineering longer ES spin coherence. © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
CITATION STYLE
Fuchs, G. D., Dobrovitski, V. V., Toyli, D. M., Heremans, F. J., Weis, C. D., Schenkel, T., & Awschalom, D. D. (2010). Excited-state spin coherence of a single nitrogen-vacancy centre in diamond. Nature Physics, 6(9), 668–672. https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1716
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