Nitrogen-vacancy color centers in diamond fabricated by ultrafast laser nanomachining

Abstract

Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) color center is one kind of luminescent point defect in diamond. NV color center is a composite structure composed of substituted nitrogen atoms and adjacent carbon vacancies in diamond. It can be applied in many fields, such as super-resolution fluorescence imaging, high-sensitive detection, and quantum computing. In order to meet the requirements of NV color center’s applications, many efforts have been devoted to study the manufacturing methods of NV color center. Nowadays, femtosecond (fs) laser technology has been widely used in the field of micro/nanomachining and gradually applied to the manufacturing of diamond NV color centers. In this chapter, the mechanism and characteristics of fs laser micro/nanomachining, the basic properties, and the applications of diamond NV color centers were concisely summarized. Moreover, the ultrafast laser processing of NV color center, the fluorescence detection of NV color center, and the anti-bunching analysis method of single NV color center are introduced and discussed in detail.