Scalable nanoscale positioning of highly coherent color centers in prefabricated diamond nanostructures.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 41198682.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-025-64758-4 and PMC identifier 12592383.
- 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
Nanophotonic devices in color center-containing hosts provide efficient readout, control, and entanglement of the embedded emitters. Yet control over color center formation - in number, position, and coherence - in nanophotonic devices remains a challenge to scalability. Here, we report a controlled creation of highly coherent diamond nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers with nanoscale three-dimensional localization in prefabricated nanostructures with high yield. Combining nitrogen δ-doping during chemical vapor deposition diamond growth and localized electron irradiation, we form shallow NVs registered to the center of diamond nanopillars with wide tunability over NV number. We report a positioning precision of ~ 4 nm in depth and 46(1) nm laterally in 280 nm-diameter pillars (102(2) nm in bulk diamond). We reliably form single NV centers with long spin coherence times (average <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <msubsup><mrow><mi>T</mi></mrow> <mrow><mn>2</mn></mrow> <mrow><mi>H</mi> <mi>a</mi> <mi>h</mi> <mi>n</mi></mrow> </msubsup> <mo>=</mo> <mn>98</mn> <mspace></mspace> <mi>μ</mi> <mi>s</mi></math> ) and higher average photoluminescence compared to NV centers randomly positioned in pillars. Our method can improve the performance of various NV-based devices. In the realm of magnetic sensing, we achieve a 3 × improved yield of NV centers with single electron-spin sensitivity over conventional implantation-based methods. Our high-yield defect creation method will enable scalable production of solid-state defect sensors and processors.