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Decoupling nuclear spins via interaction-induced freezing in nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond

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Abstract

Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) centers in diamonds provide a room-temperature platform for various emerging quantum technologies, e.g., the long nuclear spin coherence times as potential quantum memory registers. We demonstrate a freezing protocol for an NV center to isolate its intrinsic nuclear spin from a noisy electromagnetic environment. Any initial state of the nuclear spin can be frozen when the hyperfine-coupled electron and nuclear spins are simultaneously driven with unequal Rabi frequencies. Through numerical simulations, we show that our protocol can effectively shield the nuclear spin from strong drive or noise fields. We also observe a clear suppression of quantum correlations in the frozen nuclear spin regime by measuring the quantum discord of the electron–nuclear spin system. These features can be instrumental in extending the storage times of NV nuclear spin-based quantum memories in hybrid quantum systems.

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Simulation data is available upon reasonable request to the authors.

Notes

  1. A slight difference in Figs. 2d and 3b is that the population of states \(|gg \rangle \) and \(|eg \rangle \) in Fig. 2d oscillates between 1 and 0, whereas in 3b, the population of does not reach 0. This is because we are using just one MW field to drive both the transitions \(\{|0,0 \rangle \rightarrow |-1,0 \rangle \}\) and \(\{|0,+1 \rangle \rightarrow |-1,+1 \rangle \}\). The applied MW has frequency midway between these two transitions to ensure both transitions are driven with the same Rabi frequency. Using a detuned Rabi drive leads to a drop in the change of population, and there cannot be a perfect population transfer between \(\{|0,0 \rangle , |-1,0 \rangle \}\) and \(\{|0,+1 \rangle ,|-1,+1 \rangle \}\). The imperfect driving due to a detuned drive field, however, still gives the interaction-induced freezing signature, which was the main motive of this protocol.

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Acknowledgements

K.S. acknowledges financial support from IIT Bombay seed Grant Number 17IRCCSG009, DST Inspire Faculty Fellowship-DST/INSPIRE/04/2016/002284 and DST Quest Grant DST/ICPS/QuST/Theme-2/2019/Q-58. S.P. acknowledges financial support from SERB-DST, India via Grant No. SRG/2019/001419, and in the final stages of writing by Grant No. CRG/2021/003024. The authors acknowledge useful discussions with H. S. Dhar, A. Mahajan, and B. Muralidharan.

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  1. Abhishek Kejriwal and Dasika Shishir have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai, 400076, India

    Abhishek Kejriwal & Sumiran Pujari

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai, 400076, India

    Dasika Shishir & Kasturi Saha

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Kejriwal, A., Shishir, D., Pujari, S. et al. Decoupling nuclear spins via interaction-induced freezing in nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond. Quantum Inf Process 22, 289 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-023-04040-y

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