Francisco Machado

ITAMP Fellow | Harvard University



Imaging the local charge environment of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond | Francisco Machado

Imaging the local charge environment of nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond

Thomas Mittiga, Satcher Hsieh, Chong Zu, Bryce Kobrin, Francisco Machado, Prabudhya Bhattacharyya, Nicholas Rui, Andrey Jarmola, Soonwon Choi, Dmitry Budker, Norman Y. Yao
PRL (2018)
arXiv:1809.01668

Abstract

Characterizing the local internal environment surrounding solid-state spin defects is crucial to harnessing them as nanoscale sensors of external fields. This is especially germane to the case of defect ensembles which can exhibit a complex interplay between interactions, internal fields and lattice strain. Working with the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond, we demonstrate that local electric fields dominate the magnetic resonance behavior of NV ensembles at low magnetic field. We introduce a simple microscopic model that quantitatively captures the observed spectra for samples with NV concentrations spanning over two orders of magnitude. Motivated by this understanding, we propose and implement a novel method for the nanoscale localization of individual charges within the diamond lattice; our approach relies upon the fact that the charge induces an NV dark state which depends on the electric field orientation.

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