Diamond’s nitrogen vacancy (NV) center is an optically active defect with long spin coherence times, showing great potential for both efficient nanoscale magnetometry and quantum information processing schemes with room temperature operations. In an international collaborative endeavour led by CNR-IFN Milano, femtosecond laser writing has been shown as a powerful tool for both the formation of buried 3D optical components and single NVs in the bulk of diamond. Recently, an integrated device consisting of laser-written photonic waveguides in ultrapure diamond aligned to sub-micron resolution to single laser-written NVs have been realized. Laser written optical waveguides have been used to excite and collect photoluminescence signal from single NVs. The results obtained paves the way towards complex integrated diamond quantum devices with optically connected single photons from NVs for spin-based magnetic, electric and thermal sensing.
Contact person: Shane Eaton, IFN Milano