The N-V center in diamond is a widely used physical platform for quantum information science and technology due to its good controllability and long coherence at room temperature [
Photonics Research, Volume. 8, Issue 8, 1289(2020)
Pulse-width-induced polarization enhancement of optically pumped N-V electron spin in diamond
The nitrogen-vacancy (N-V) center in diamond is a widely used platform for quantum information processing and sensing. The electron-spin state of the N-V center could be initialized, read out optically, and manipulated by resonate microwave fields. In this work, we analyze the dependence of electron-spin initialization on widths of laser pulses. We build a numerical model to simulate this process and to verify the simulation results in experiments. Both simulations and experiments reveal that shorter laser pulses are helpful to the electron-spin polarization. We therefore propose to use extremely short laser pulses for electron-spin initialization. In this new scheme, the spin-state contrast could be improved about 10% in experiments by using laser pulses as short as 4 ns in width. Furthermore, we provide a mechanism to explain this effect, which is due to the occupation time in the meta-stable spin-singlet states of the N-V center. Our new scheme is applicable in a broad range of N-V-based applications in the future.
1. INTRODUCTION
The N-V center in diamond is a widely used physical platform for quantum information science and technology due to its good controllability and long coherence at room temperature [
The energy levels of the N-V center are shown in Fig.
Figure 1.Experimental scheme and main result. (a) Experimental setup and a single N-V center in diamond. (b) Electron-spin energy-level of N-V center and the spin dynamics of the pumping process at room temperature. The transition of pumping laser (532 nm) is indicated by the green solid line, while the radiative (nonradiative) transition is the red solid (gray dashed) line. (c) Pulse sequence of the electron-spin Rabi oscillation using repeatedly pulse-width-modulated laser. (d) Effect of pulse-width modulation in electron-spin Rabi oscillation. Blue (red) points are experimental data with 300 ns (4 ns) laser pulses with the pulse sequence shown in (c). The number 33.3% (37.1%) noted in the plot is the contrast value between the
As a fundamental technique for initialization and readout, the optical pumping process has been parametrically studied, and the transition rates between the electron-spin states have been measured experimentally [
Sign up for Photonics Research TOC Get the latest issue of Advanced Photonics delivered right to you!Sign up now
In this paper, we study the effect of the pumping laser’s width on the electron-spin polarization and provide a more efficient optical initialization scheme in experiments. We change the experimental pumping sequence by repeatedly applying short laser pulses instead of a single long pulse until a steady spin-state is achieved. Numerical simulation indicates better polarization could be achieved when the pulse width decreases. This result is then verified by observing the spin-state contrast of Rabi oscillation in experiments. We show that the mechanism of this effect is the overall dwelling time of the N-V center in the meta-stable spin-singlet states. Consequently, by reducing the pulse width to 4 ns, we observe a 10% enhancement in spin-state contrast. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for quantum sensing experiment scales as the square root of total measurement time [
2. RESULTS
The essential idea of this work is to examine the dependence of the spin-state polarization on laser pulse widths in the pumping process. The traditional pulse sequence for laser polarization consists of a single square laser pulse followed with a wait time. In this work, we extend this single-loop mode to a more generalized mode, as shown in Fig.
In order to evaluate the efficiency of this new sequence, a rate equation model is built to simulate the pumping process and calculate the expected polarization at the end of the process. Details of the numerical model and simulation parameters are discussed in the following sections. We apply this new sequence in experiments and parametrically study the performance of the process. Direct detection of the electron-spin polarization requires either single-shot spin readout at a cryogenic temperature [
We first examine the pumping process by using different widths of laser pulses in the above sequence. By repeating the pulse loops, we observe the polarization directly in numerical simulations. In Fig.
Figure 2.Numerical simulations and their corresponding experimental results. (a) For laser pulses with three different widths, the highest polarization that can be achieved in simulation is dependent on the repeating times
Further, we study the saturated polarization level for each pulse width , i.e., the stable value when is large enough. The simulation result is shown in Fig.
In experiments, we demonstrate that this new pumping method with repeatedly applied short laser pulses indeed enhances polarization in the N-V center. For comparison, we measure the Rabi signals using 300 ns (a typical width in traditional experiments) and 4 ns laser pulses by this new method, as shown in Fig.
To show the robustness of our method, we also investigate the influence of different wait time and laser power in experiments. In Fig.
Figure 3.Measured Rabi oscillation in terms of spin contrast for (a) different wait time
3. NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS
Here, we describe the details of the numerical simulation. The dynamics of the laser pumping process is shown in Fig. Transition Rates in Numerical SimulationTransition Rate ( Transition Rate ( 0.628 0.1884 0.4396 6.28 0.0314 0.020724 0.013816
The pumping process in a typical N-V experiment consists of a single square laser pulse and a wait time, as shown in Fig.
Figure 4.Mechanism and simulation results. (a) The population transfer
4. MECHANISM
Here, we consider the case where the pumping process starts with a thermal state . For a single-pulse loop with a short laser pulse and a wait time, the increased polarization depends on the value , where denotes the transferred population from state to in a single loop. As the pulse loop starts to repeat, the population increases while decreases; thus, goes smaller and goes bigger. Finally, a steady state is obtained with , and the pumping process is completed. This process is show in Fig.
The reason for this pulse-width-induced polarization difference, however, is the overall population of the N-V center in the spin-singlet meta-stable states, i.e., states and . During the initialization process, the transferred population from state () to increases (decreases) until a steady state is reached. Once the N-V center is on the state , it falls down to state immediately and, subsequently, onto the ground state or . Since the transition rates from state to states and are almost the same, this transition transfers similar amounts of population to the ground spin-states and reduces the final polarization of the whole pumping process.
Therefore, reducing the dwelling time on the meta-stable states would increase the final polarization level in the process. To confirm, we integrate the population and calculate the probability of the N-V center on states and during the pumping process (including the wait time) in simulation. The relation between the probability at the meta-stable states and the occupation of the laser over all the process is shown in Fig.
5. EXPERIMENTS
To demonstrate, we use a home-built optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) system to address and manipulate the single N-V-based centers in a type-IIa, single-crystal synthetic diamond sample (Element Six). As shown in Fig.
In this work, the pumping laser beam is modulated by a 350 MHz AOM before being applied on the sample. The AOM is driven by a 2.6 GS/s AWG (Tektronix AWG610) with an output bandwidth over 800 MHz, which is capable of generating laser pulses as short as 4 ns. In order to suppress the laser leakage, another AOM is used following the first one, which turns off the laser in the rest time of the experiments. In order to measure the spin-state contrast, we perform a Rabi oscillation experiment, as shown in Fig.
6. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Considering the total overhead in experiments, our method requires an extra time cost of a few microseconds to perform the laser pulse and wait time for many repetitions. In most N-V applications, such as sensing remote spins or magnetic signals, the experiment operation time ranges from hundreds of microseconds to hundreds of milliseconds [
To conclude, we analyze the pulse-width-induced effect on the electron-spin polarization of the N-V center in the optical initialization process and provide a new scheme to polarize the electron spin with repeatedly applied short laser pulses. This new scheme provides an enhancement of about 10% in readout efficiency, leading to a nearly 20% saving of time cost in experiments. Moreover, we build a numerical model to simulate the optical initialization process and calculate the dependence of the polarization using different parameters. The result matches well with the experimental observations of the spin-state contrast. By analyzing the mechanism of our new scheme, we conclude that the superiority of our method is mainly due to the reduction of the dwelling time on the meta-stable spin-singlet states during the initialization process. Our new scheme could be applied to N-V-based quantum applications in a broad range and may shed light on understanding the optical initialization process in the N-V centers.
Get Citation
Copy Citation Text
Yumeng Song, Yu Tian, Zhiyi Hu, Feifei Zhou, Tengteng Xing, Dawei Lu, Bing Chen, Ya Wang, Nanyang Xu, Jiangfeng Du. Pulse-width-induced polarization enhancement of optically pumped N-V electron spin in diamond[J]. Photonics Research, 2020, 8(8): 1289
Category: Quantum Optics
Received: Jan. 8, 2020
Accepted: Jun. 3, 2020
Published Online: Jul. 14, 2020
The Author Email: Bing Chen (bingchenphysics@hfut.edu.cn), Nanyang Xu (nyxu@hfut.edu.cn), Jiangfeng Du (djf@ustc.edu.cn)