Lee Bassett5,Artur Lozovoi1,Harishankar Jayakumar1,Damon Daw1,Gyorgy Vizkelethy2,Edward Bielejec2,Marcus Doherty3,Johannes Flick4,Carlos Meriles1
CUNY-City College of New York1,Sandia National Laboratories2,The Australian National University3,Flatiron Institute4,University of Pennsylvania5
Lee Bassett5,Artur Lozovoi1,Harishankar Jayakumar1,Damon Daw1,Gyorgy Vizkelethy2,Edward Bielejec2,Marcus Doherty3,Johannes Flick4,Carlos Meriles1
CUNY-City College of New York1,Sandia National Laboratories2,The Australian National University3,Flatiron Institute4,University of Pennsylvania5
Charge control of color centers in semiconductors promises opportunities for novel forms of sensing and quantum information processing. This presentation discusses recent work articulating confocal fluorescence microscopy and magnetic resonance protocols to induce and probe charge transport between discrete sets of engineered nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, down to the level of individual defects. In our experiments, a ‘source’ NV undergoes optically-driven cycles of ionization and recombination to produce a stream of photo-generated carriers, one of which we subsequently capture via a ‘target’ NV several micrometers away. We use a spin-to-charge conversion scheme to encode the spin state of the source color center into the charge state of the target, in the process allowing us to set an upper bound to carrier injection from other background defects. We attribute our observations to the action of unscreened Coulomb potentials producing giant carrier capture cross-sections, orders of magnitude greater than those typically attained in ensemble measurements. Besides their fundamental interest, these results open intriguing prospects for applications ranging from the use of free carriers to expose otherwise invisible point defects, to establishing a quantum bus to mediate effective interactions between paramagnetic defects in a solid-state chip.