2025/12/12 by Wyatt, Lillian B. Hughes, Parthasarathy, Shreyas, Kantor, Isaac +6
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Diamond and Carbon-based Materials Research #Electronic and Structural Properties of Oxides #FOS: Physical sciences #Magnetic properties of thin films #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.11242
openalex publication_date 2025/12/12 · openalex created_date 2025/12/16 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Engineering shallow nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond holds the key to unlocking new advances in nanoscale quantum sensing. We find that the creation of near-surface NVs through delta doping during diamond growth allows for tunable control over both NV depth confinement (with a twofold improvement relative to low-energy ion implantation) and NV density, ultimately resulting in highly-sensitive single defects and ensembles with coherence limited by NV-NV interactions. Additionally, we demonstrate the utility of our shallow delta-doped NVs by imaging magnetism in few-layer CrSBr, a two-dimensional magnet. We anticipate that the control afforded by near-surface delta doping will enable new developments in NV quantum sensing from nanoscale NMR to entanglement-enhanced metrology.