Decoherence and dynamical decoupling control of nitrogen-vacancy center electron spins in nuclear spin baths

TL;DR

This paper models decoherence of nitrogen-vacancy center electron spins in diamond due to hyperfine interactions with nuclear spins, analyzing how external magnetic fields influence decoherence mechanisms and exploring dynamical decoupling control strategies.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical framework linking nuclear spin bath dynamics to electron spin decoherence, highlighting the role of different elementary processes under varying magnetic fields.

Findings

Decoherence is driven by entanglement with nuclear spins influenced by bath evolution.

Elementary processes like single spin precession and pairwise flip-flops are key to decoherence.

External magnetic fields alter the dominance of different decoherence mechanisms.

Abstract

We theoretically study the decoherence and the dynamical decoupling control of nitrogen-vacancy center electron spins in high-purity diamond, where the hyperfine interaction with $^{13}$C nuclear spins is the dominating decoherence mechanism. The decoherence is formulated as the entanglement between the electron spin and the nuclear spins, which is induced by nuclear spin bath evolution conditioned on the electron spin state. The nuclear spin bath evolution is driven by elementary processes such as single spin precession and pairwise flip-flops. The importance of different elementary processes in the decoherence depends on the strength of the external magnetic field.