We report the optical observation of lead-vacancy (PbV) centers in diamond fabricated by Pb ion implantation and subsequent high-temperature annealing (2100℃ under high pressure (7.7 GPa). Their optical properties were characterized by photoluminescence at varying temperatures down to 5.7 K. We observed intense emission peaks at 550 and 554 nm with a large splitting of approximately 3900 GHz. The two lines are thought to correspond to the zero phonon line (ZPL) of PbV centers with split ground and excited states. A cubic trend of the ZPL width was observed while varying temperature. We performed polarization measurements of the two lines in a single PbV center, showing nearly orthogonal dipole polarizations. These optical measurements strongly indicate that the PbV center possesses 𝐷 symmetry in the diamond lattice. The observed large ground state splitting significantly suppresses the phononmediated transition, which causes decoherence of the electron spin state of the group IV color centers in diamond, expecting a long spin coherence time at a temperature of ~8 K.

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