Electrical Tuning of Single Nitrogen-Vacancy Center Optical Transitions Enhanced by Photoinduced Fields

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates precise electrical control over the optical transition energies of individual nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond, utilizing the dc Stark effect enhanced by photoinduced local electric fields, enabling tuning over >10 GHz.

Contribution

The study introduces a method to tune NV center optical transitions via multiaxis electric fields, revealing asymmetries caused by photoionized charge traps, and achieves degeneracy tuning of excited-state orbitals.

Findings

Achieved >10 GHz tuning of NV center optical transitions.

Discovered asymmetries in Stark shifts due to local charge traps.

Enhanced control facilitates integration of NV centers in photonic networks.

Abstract

We demonstrate precise control over the zero-phonon optical transition energies of individual nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond by applying multiaxis electric fields, via the dc Stark effect. The Stark shifts display surprising asymmetries that we attribute to an enhancement and rectification of the local electric field by photoionized charge traps in the diamond. Using this effect, we tune the excited-state orbitals of strained NV centers to degeneracy and vary the resulting degenerate optical transition frequency by >10 GHz, a scale comparable to the inhomogeneous frequency distribution. This technique will facilitate the integration of NV-center spins within photonic networks.