Bulk diamond optical waveguides fabricated by focused femtosecond laser pulses

Abstract

Diamond’s nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers show great promise in sensing applications and quantum computing due to their long electron spin coherence time and their ability to be located, manipulated and read out using light. The electrons of the NV center, largely localized at the vacancy site, combine to form a spin triplet, which can be polarized with 532- nm laser light, even at room temperature. The NV's states are isolated from environmental perturbations making their spin coherence comparable to trapped ions. An important breakthrough would be in connecting, using waveguides, multiple diamond NVs together optically. However, the inertness of diamond is a significant hurdle for the fabrication of integrated optics similar to those that revolutionized silicon photonics. In this work we show the possibility of buried waveguide fabrication in diamond, enabled by focused femtosecond high repetition rate laser pulses. We use μRaman spectroscopy to gain better insight into the structure and refractive index profile of the optical waveguides.