Room-temperature inversionless diamond nitrogen-vacancy electronic spin maser

Abstract

We propose a method to create a room-temperature maser operating at approximately 2.9~GHz frequency using an ensemble of negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy electronic spins (NV) in diamond, without requiring population inversion. Our method considers a DC magnetic field of a few milli-Tesla (mT) applied along the perpendicular direction of an ensemble of NV spins aligned along a common axis. This perpendicular magnetic-field creates superposition states of $|m_{\mathrm{s}}=-1\rangle$ and $|m_{\mathrm{s}}=+1\rangle$ of the NV spin's ground state triplet levels and thereby makes it possible to drive all three transitions in the NV spin ground state. We model the system by including optical pumping of the NV spins, near-resonant driving of two transitions, and coupling the third transition to a near-resonant microwave resonator. Numerical estimates using experimentally realizable parameters show that inversionless masing can be achieved inside the microwave resonator using our method. As an application, we show that the output intensity of an inversionless maser ($1.1\times10^{14}$ spins) can be used for magnetic field sensing with a DC sensitivity on the order of a hundred pT/$\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$. Our study opens a new direction in room-temperature diamond NV maser devices for quantum technological applications without the requirement of a strong bias magnetic field, as in conventional NV diamond masers.