Enhanced concentrations of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond through TEM irradiation

Abstract

The studies of many-body dynamics of interacting spin ensembles, as well as quantum sensing in solid state systems, are often limited by the need for high spin concentrations, along with efficient decoupling of the spin ensemble of interest from its spin-bath environment. In particular, for an ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, high conversion efficiencies between nitrogen (P1) defects and NV centers are essential, while maintaining long coherence times of an NV ensemble. In this work, we study the effect of electron irradiation on the conversion efficiency and the coherence time of various types of diamond samples with different initial nitrogen concentrations. The samples were irradiated using a 200 keV transmission electron microscope (TEM). Our study reveals that the efficiency of NV creation strongly depends on the initial conversion efficiency as well as on the initial nitrogen concentration. We observe an order of magnitude improvement in the NV concentration (up to $\sim 10^{11}$ NV/cm^2), without any degradation in their coherence times of $\sim 180$ \mu m. We address the potential of this technique to pave the way toward the study of many-body physics of ensembles of NV spins, and contribute to the creation of non-classical spin states for quantum sensing.