Protecting solid-state spins from strongly coupled environment

TL;DR

This paper investigates protecting the intrinsic $^{14}$N nuclear spin in NV centers from decoherence by electronic spin fluctuations, enhancing quantum memory coherence time through dynamical decoupling.

Contribution

It identifies the decoherence mechanism of the $^{14}$N nuclear spin and proposes a dynamical decoupling scheme to significantly extend its coherence time.

Findings

Achieved a threefold increase in storage time in experiments.

Demonstrated protection of quantum memory from electronic spin noise.

Provided a pathway for fast, long-lived quantum memories in solid-state systems.

Abstract

Quantum memories are critical for solid-state quantum computing devices and a good quantum memory requires both long storage time and fast read/write operations. A promising system is the Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) center in diamond, where the NV electronic spin serves as the computing qubit and a nearby nuclear spin as the memory qubit. Previous works used remote, weakly coupled $^{13}$C nuclear spins, trading read/write speed for long storage time. Here we focus instead on the intrinsic strongly coupled $^{14}$N nuclear spin. We first quantitatively understand its decoherence mechanism, identifying as its source the electronic spin that acts as a quantum fluctuator. We then propose a scheme to protect the quantum memory from the fluctuating noise by applying dynamical decoupling on the environment itself. We demonstrate a factor of $3$ enhancement of the storage time in a proof-of-principle experiment, showing the potential for a quantum memory that combines fast operation with long coherence time.