2010/10/06 by Lucio Robledo, Hannes Bernien, Toeno van der Sar +1 · 273 citations
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Chemical and Physical Properties of Materials #Diamond and Carbon-based Materials Research #Excitation #Excited state #Intersystem crossing #Ion-surface interactions and analysis #Picosecond #Population #Singlet state #Spin (aerodynamics) #cond-mat.other #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1367-2630/13/2/025013
published in New Journal of Physics 13(2), 025013 (IOP Publishing) · 11 pages, 5 figures
arxiv created 2010/10/06 · openalex publication_date 2011/02/21 · arxiv updated 2011/02/25 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
We investigate spin-dependent decay and intersystem crossing (ISC) in the optical cycle of single negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centres in diamond. We use spin control and pulsed optical excitation to extract both the spin-resolved lifetimes of the excited states and the degree of optically induced spin polarization. By optically exciting the centre with a series of picosecond pulses, we determine the spin-flip probabilities per optical cycle, as well as the spin-dependent probability for ISC. This information, together with the independently measured decay rate of singlet population, provides a full description of spin dynamics in the optical cycle of NV centres. The temperature dependence of the singlet population decay rate provides information about the number of singlet states involved in the optical cycle.