Room-temperature control and electrical readout of individual nitrogen-vacancy nuclear spins.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 34285223.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-24494-x and PMC identifier 8292375.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Nuclear spins in semiconductors are leading candidates for future quantum technologies, including quantum computation, communication, and sensing. Nuclear spins in diamond are particularly attractive due to their long coherence time. With the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centre, such nuclear qubits benefit from an auxiliary electronic qubit, which, at cryogenic temperatures, enables probabilistic entanglement mediated optically by photonic links. Here, we demonstrate a concept of a microelectronic quantum device at ambient conditions using diamond as wide bandgap semiconductor. The basic quantum processor unit - a single <sup>14</sup>N nuclear spin coupled to the NV electron - is read photoelectrically and thus operates in a manner compatible with nanoscale electronics. The underlying theory provides the key ingredients for photoelectric quantum gate operations and readout of nuclear qubit registers. This demonstration is, therefore, a step towards diamond quantum devices with a readout area limited by inter-electrode distance rather than by the diffraction limit. Such scalability could enable the development of electronic quantum processors based on the dipolar interaction of spin-qubits placed at nanoscopic proximity.