Towards light-matter interface for the NV center in diamond

Abstract

The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond is attracting a lot of attention in quantum information processing community. A spin system in the NV center is positioned in a clean and well-controlled environment. As a result, it shows outstanding performance as quantum memory, even at room temperature, allows for spin control with a single shot optical readout, and offers a possibility of building quantum registers on a single NV center. At low temperature, the NV centers have narrow optical transitions, which enable interfacing between optical photons and the NV center spin states. Recently, the entanglement of two independent NV centers has been demonstrated. This makes the NV center a promising candidate for realization of quantum repeaters. Moreover, the NV centers could be used as sensitive elements of detectors of magnetic or electric fields, temperature etc‥ For all of these applications collection of the light emitted by the NV center is a crucial point. Recent developments in the field of metamaterials allowed creating hyperbolic metamaterials which may provide an efficient interface for coupling light into and out of the NV centers and, in particular, enable a single photon source based on NV. In this work, I will present our work on using CMOS-compatible hyperbolic metamaterials and optical fibers to construct efficient single photon sources and sensing elements using NV centers in diamond.