Construction and operation of a tabletop system for nanoscale magnetometry with single nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond

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 13 C 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 providing extensive discussions on the details of the setup and the experimental procedures, our system will be reproducible by those who have not worked on the NV centers previously.

Spin coherence and depths of single nitrogen-vacancy centers created by ion implantation into diamond via screening masks

“…10 of Ref. 30 for another example of the NMR spectrum measured with a different, shallower NV center in the same sample. )…”

“…P 0 is the probability of the final spin state being m S = 0, which we calculate from calibrated photon counts. 30 We describe a general coherence decay curve as…”

“…The experimental setup used in the present work, including our method to generate microwave pulses, is described in detail in Ref. 30. It is a homebuilt tabletop scanning confocal microscope combined with highfrequency electronics, enabling time-domain and multifrequency ODMR of single NV centers.…”

Detection and control of single proton spins in a thin layer of diamond grown by chemical vapor deposition

“…By detecting the proton spin stroboscopically only at the end of the N -pulse sequences, the proton spin is seen to rotate about the A ⊥ axis, when B 0 ≫ A ,⊥ (2π/γ H ). [17][18][19][20] The NMR signal oscillates at the frequency f osc of 7.414 kHz. Crucially, the quantum nature of the coupling is evident from the data in which P 0,X goes well below 0.5.…”

“…Correlation spectroscopy enables a further analysis of the NV-proton interaction. 20 The sequence is given by L-X/2-(XY16-32)-Y/2-t corr -Y/2-(XY16-32)-X/2-L RO , where t corr is swept, with τ fixed at 412.5 ns = (2×1.2121 MHz) −1 . Figure 1(c) demonstrates a two-component oscillation with frequencies at f 0 = 1.2234 MHz and f 1 = 1.2046 MHz [the bottom panel of Fig.…”