Room-temperature control and electrical readout of individual nitrogen-vacancy nuclear spins

Abstract

Nuclear spins in semiconductors are leading candidates for future quantum technologies, including quantum computation, communication, and sensing. Nuclear spins in diamond are particularly attractive due to their long coherence time. With the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centre, such nuclear qubits benefit from an auxiliary electronic qubit, which, at cryogenic temperatures, enables probabilistic entanglement mediated optically by photonic links. Here, we demonstrate a concept of a microelectronic quantum device at ambient conditions using diamond as wide bandgap semiconductor. The basic quantum processor unit - a single N-14 nuclear spin coupled to the NV electron - is read photoelectrically and thus operates in a manner compatible with nanoscale electronics. The underlying theory provides the key ingredients for photoelectric quantum gate operations and readout of nuclear qubit registers. This demonstration is, therefore, a step towards diamond quantum devices with a readout area limited by inter-electrode distance rather than by the diffraction limit. Such scalability could enable the development of electronic quantum processors based on the dipolar interaction of spin-qubits placed at nanoscopic proximity. Nuclear spins in diamond are promising for applications in quantum technologies due to their long coherence times. Here, the authors demonstrate a scalable electrical readout of individual intrinsic N-14 nuclear spins in diamond, mediated by hyperfine coupling to electron spin of the NV center, as a step towards room-temperature nanoscale diamond quantum devices.