Longitudinal relaxation of a nitrogen-vacancy center in a spin bath by generalized cluster-correlation expansion method

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generalized cluster-correlation expansion method to accurately simulate the longitudinal relaxation dynamics of NV centers in diamond, capturing both dephasing and population decay across different regimes.

Contribution

The authors develop a generalized CCE that includes electron spins, enabling comprehensive simulation of NV center relaxation dynamics in a nuclear spin bath.

Findings

Successfully simulates decay process induced by cross relaxation.

Describes pure-dephasing effects at large detuning.

Models quantum population dynamics near resonance.

Abstract

We theoretically study the longitudinal relaxation of a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center surrounded by a 13C nuclear spin bath in diamond. By incorporating electron spin in the cluster, we generalize the cluster-correlation expansion (CCE) to theoretically simulate the population dynamics of electron spin of NV center. By means of the generalized CCE, we numerically demonstrate the decay process of electronic state induced by cross relaxation at the ambient temperature. It is shown that the CCE method is not only capable of describing pure-dephasing effect at large-detuning regime, but it can also simulate the quantum dynamics of populations in the nearly-resonant regime.