First-Principles Study of the Stark Effect of the NV Center

The NV center is a defect found in diamond and consists of a nitrogen substitution and a adjacent vacancy. It is arguably the most studied defect thanks to its particular electronic structure which leads to several important quantum technology applications such as solid-state qubit or in quantum sensing. In particular, the spin-conserving optical transition from the ³A₂ state to the ³E state at 1.945eV plays an important role in all the aforementioned applications. This optical transition is accompanied with a change of dipole moment. Applying an electric field will therefore change the energy difference between the two levels, a phenomenon well-known and called the Stark effect. The Stark shift is detrimental for quantum emitters as fluctuation of the local field will cause spectral diffusion. It is therefore important to quantify this effect with precision.<br/><br/>In this poster, we present the results of our density functional theory calculation on the NV center. We use several methods to compute the dipole moment of the ³A₂ ground-state and the ³E excited-state such as the modern theory of polarization or electric field calculation. We then compare the different methods used with experimental results.