A team led by Hodaka Kurokawa, Hideo Kosaka, and their co-authors at Yokohama National University, AIST, and QST has demonstrated a new method for controlling the orbital states of a neutral NV center in diamond at millikelvin temperatures. These results have been published in Physical Review Letters.
Key findings include:
・A tenfold increase in the orbital relaxation time of a neutral NV center by cooling from 5 K to 15 mK
・Use of dynamical decoupling pulses to boost orbital coherence time to over 1.6 microseconds, a 30-fold improvement
The neutral NV center is a promising platform for microwave-optical quantum interfaces due to its high sensitivity to electric fields and its ground state splitting around 10 GHz. We have demonstrated that the orbital lifetime and coherence can be enhanced up to 5 microseconds and 1.6 microseconds, respectively, which is more than a 10-fold increase. These results open up the possibility of microwave-optical quantum electrodynamics using a single optically active defect center in diamond.
