Abstract
The application of masers is limited by its demanding working conditions (high vacuum or low temperature). A room-temperature solid-state maser is highly desirable, but the lifetimes of emitters (electron spins) in solids at room temperature are usually too short (∼ns) for population inversion. Masing from pentacene spins in p-terphenyl crystals, which have a long spin lifetime (∼0.1 ms), has been demonstrated. This maser, however, operates only in the pulsed mode. Here we propose a room-temperature maser based on nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond, which features the longest known solid-state spin lifetime (∼5 ms) at room temperature, high optical pumping efficiency (∼106 s−1) and material stability. Our numerical simulation demonstrates that a maser with a coherence time of approximately minutes is feasible under readily accessible conditions (cavity Q-factor ∼5 × 104, diamond size ∼3 × 3 × 0.5 mm3 and pump power <10 W). A room-temperature diamond maser may facilitate a broad range of microwave technologies.
Highlights
The application of masers is limited by its demanding working conditions
Population inversion requires a spin relaxation rate lower than the pump rate. This sets the bottleneck in room-temperature solid-state masers, as the spin relaxation times in solids are usually extremely short at room temperature due to rapid phonon scattering[7]
The spin relaxation induced by phonon scattering can be largely suppressed in light-element materials where the spin–orbit coupling is weak
Summary
The application of masers is limited by its demanding working conditions (high vacuum or low temperature). We propose a room-temperature maser based on nitrogen-vacancy centres in diamond, which features the longest known solid-state spin lifetime (B5 ms) at room temperature, high optical pumping efficiency (B106 s À 1) and material stability. Population inversion requires a spin relaxation rate lower than the pump rate This sets the bottleneck in room-temperature solid-state masers, as the spin relaxation times in solids are usually extremely short (approximately nanoseconds8) at room temperature due to rapid phonon scattering[7]. Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centre spins in diamond[12] have been extensively studied for quantum information processing[12] and quantum sensing[13,14,15] This is due to their long coherence time at room temperature and high efficiencies of initialization by optical pumping and readout via photon detection. On the basis of these works, we here propose a new class of quantum technologies based on NV centres in diamond, namely, room-temperature solid-state masers and microwave amplifiers
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