nLab nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond

Contents

Idea

In solid state physics, an impure form of diamond may be obtained where, in the center of the Bravais lattice, carbon nuclei are replaced by a nitrogen nucleus and a vacancy, referred to as the nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond (often short: NV center).

In such a material, the spin of one of the electron orbitals bound to the nitrogen nucleus has a long quantum decoherence time and lends itself to manipulation by spin resonance.

from AHWZ18, Fig 1

Original articles:

J. M. Taylor et al., High-sensitivity diamond magnetometer with nanoscale resolution, Nature Phys 4 (2008) 810–816 [doi:10.1038/nphys1075]

Review and further discussion

David D. Awschalom, Ronald Hanson, Jörg Wrachtrup & Brian B. Zhou, Quantum technologies with optically interfaced solid-state spins, Nature Photonics 12 (2018) 516–527 [doi:10.1038/s41566-018-0232-2]
Awschalom group, The Nitrogen-Vacancy Center in Diamond [web]

Application to quantum sensing:

Jixing Zhang, Lixia Xu, Guodong Bian, Pengcheng Fan, Mingxin Li, Wuming Liu, Heng Yuan, Diamond Nitrogen-Vacancy Center Magnetometry: Advances and Challenges [arXiv:2010.10231]
Mouzhe Xie et al., Biocompatible surface functionalization architecture for a diamond quantum sensor, PNAS 119 8 (2022) e2114186119 [arXiv:2108.04843, doi:10.1073/pnas.2114186119]
Nick R. Neuling, Robin D. Allert, Dominik B. Bucher, Prospects of Single-Cell NMR Spectroscopy with Quantum Sensors, Current Opinion in Biotechnology 83 (2023) 102975 [arXiv:2306.07593, doi:10.1016/j.copbio.2023.102975]
M. Barson et al.: Nanomechanical sensing using spins in diamond, Nano Letters 17 3 (2017) [arXiv:1612.05325, doi:10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b04544]

Survey:

Mouzhe Xie, Diamond-based quantum sensor for molecular analytics, talk at CQTS (Apr 2023) [slides: pdf, video: YT]