Proposal for detection of a single electron spin in a microwave resonator

Abstract

We propose a method for detecting the presence of a single spin in a crystal by coupling it to a high-quality factor superconducting planar resonator. By confining the microwave field in a constriction of nanometric dimensions, the coupling constant can be as high as $5-10$\,kHz. This coupling affects the amplitude of the field emitted by the resonator, and the integrated homodyne signal allows detection of a single spin with unit signal-to-noise ratio within few milliseconds. We further show that a stochastic master equation approach and a Bayesian analysis of the full time dependent homodyne signal improves this figure by $\sim 30\%$ for typical parameters.