Quantum decoherence of nitrogen-vacancy spin ensembles in a nitrogen spin bath in diamond under dynamical decoupling

Abstract

The negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond has emerged as a leading qubit platform for quantum technology applications. One of the key challenges for NV-based quantum applications is building an accurate model to predict its decoherence properties and their quantum nature. In this study, we combine theory and experiment to investigate NV decoherence dynamics in the presence of nitrogen donor (P1 center) baths, which is one of the dominant decoherence sources in diamond. We employ a cluster-correlation expansion (CCE) method to compute the NV decoherence under the Hahn-echo (HE) and Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill (CPMG) pulse sequences at various P1 concentrations from 1ppm to 300 ppm. We show that the coherence time (T2) increases with the number of pi pulses applied, indicating that the NV spin is decoupled from the P1 bath. Notably, we find that T2 scales quadratically as a function of the pulse number, on a logarithmic scale, as opposed to the linear scaling predicted by widely accepted semi-classical theories in the literature. In our experiment, we measure the CPMG signal for two diamond samples with high P1 concentrations of 0.8ppm and 13ppm. We demonstrate that the T2 scaling is indeed quadratic, thus confirming our theoretical predictions. Our results show that the quantum bath model combined with the CCE method can accurately capture the quantum nature of the P1-driven NV decoherence. Our study opens a new avenue for developing a complete noise model that could be used to optimize the performance of NV-based quantum devices.