Online optimization for optical readout of a single electron spin in diamond

Abstract

The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond has been developed as a promising platform for quantum sensing, especially for magnetic field measurements in the nano-tesla range with a nano-meter resolution. Optical spin readout performance has a direct effect on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of experiments. In this work, we introduce an online optimization method to customize the laser waveform for readout. Both simulations and experiments reveal that our new scheme optimizes the optically detected magnetic resonance in NV center. The SNR of optical spin readout has been witnessed a 44.1% increase in experiments. In addition, we applied the scheme to the Rabi oscillation experiment, which shows an improvement of 46.0% in contrast and a reduction of 12.1% in mean deviation compared to traditional constant laser power SNR optimization. This scheme is promising to improve sensitivities for a wide range of NV-based applications in the future.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

NV center / readout / signal-to-noise ratio / online optimization

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Electronic supplementary material

Supplementary materials are available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-022-1235-5 and https://journal.hep.com.cn/fop/EN/10.1007/s11467-022-1235-5 and are accessible for authorized users.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant Nos. 2018YFA0306600 and 2019YFA0308100), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 92265114, 92265204, and 11875159), and the Research Initiation Project (No. K2022MB0PI02) of Zhejiang Lab.

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