Abstract
A single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond is a prime candidate for a solid-state quantum magnetometer capable of detecting single nuclear spins with prospective application to nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) at the nanoscale. Nonetheless, an NV magnetometer is still less accessible to many chemists and biologists as its experimental setup and operational principle are starkly different from those of conventional NMR. Here, we design, construct, and operate a compact tabletop-sized system for quantum sensing with a single NV center, built primarily from commercially available optical components and electronics. We show that our setup can implement state-of-the-art quantum sensing protocols that enable the detection of single 13C nuclear spins in diamond and the characterization of their interaction parameters, as well as the detection of a small ensemble of proton nuclear spins on the diamond surface. This article provides extensive discussions on the details of the setup and the experimental procedures, and our system will be reproducible by those who have not worked on the NV centers previously.
Highlights
Quantum sensing aims to measure physical quantities such as magnetic field, electric field, temperature with high sensitivity, and precision by exploiting a controlled quantum system as a sensor.1 Its rapid growth as a subfield of quantum technology owes in no small part to the negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond, which is among the most promising platforms for a solid-state quantum sensor,2–7 with a wide range of applications including nanoscale magnetic resonance imaging.8–16 In a diamond substrate with sufficiently low NV defect density, a single isolated NV center can be resolved optically, and its electronic spin can be initialized by optical pumping and coherently manipulated by a series of microwave pulses
A few platforms targeted for NV magnetometry have become commercially available,31–34 but industriallevel turn-key systems are still yet to come. Feel that at this stage, it is important and helpful to provide a comprehensive and detailed description about the construction and operation of a simple single NV magnetometer, especially the one which we believe is reproducible by nonspecialists without sacrificing an immense amount of their time and effort. Circumstantial evidence of this belief is that the setup we describe below was constructed from scratch and tested -undergraduate students with no prior hands-on experience with either optics or microwave engineering
When the defect is illuminated by a green laser, it emits photons at the wavelength ranging from 637 nm to 800 nm
Summary
Quantum sensing aims to measure physical quantities such as magnetic field (magnetometry), electric field (electrometry), temperature (thermometry) with high sensitivity, and precision by exploiting a controlled quantum system as a sensor. Its rapid growth as a subfield of quantum technology owes in no small part to the negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond, which is among the most promising platforms for a solid-state quantum sensor, with a wide range of applications including nanoscale magnetic resonance imaging (nanoMRI). In a diamond substrate with sufficiently low NV defect density, a single isolated NV center can be resolved optically, and its electronic spin can be initialized by optical pumping and coherently manipulated by a series of microwave pulses. Feel that at this stage, it is important and helpful to provide a comprehensive and detailed description about the construction and operation of a simple single NV magnetometer, especially the one which we believe is reproducible by nonspecialists without sacrificing an immense amount of their time and effort. Circumstantial evidence of this belief is that the setup we describe below was constructed from scratch and tested -undergraduate students with no prior hands-on experience with either optics or microwave engineering. Throughout this article, we have nonspecialists in mind and aim to provide comprehensive and pedagogical descriptions
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