Efficient Identifying the Orientation of Single NV Centers in Diamond and Using them to Detect Near Field Microwave

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-efficiency method to identify the orientation of single NV centers in diamond using combined fluorescence imaging and magnetic resonance, enabling improved nanoscale microwave sensing.

Contribution

The authors developed a practicable method to quickly identify NV center orientations, facilitating enhanced quantum sensing applications with NV arrays.

Findings

Successfully identified five NV centers with the same orientation.

Measured microwave near fields using NV centers with high spatial resolution.

Demonstrated the potential for sub-microscale microwave gradient sensing.

Abstract

Arrays of NV centers in the diamond have the potential in the fields of chip-scale quantum information processing and nanoscale quantum sensing. However, determining their orientations one by one is resource intensive and time consuming. Here, in this paper, by combining scanning confocal fluorescence images and optical detected magnetic resonance, we realized a method of identifying single NV centers with the same orientation, which is practicable and high efficiency. In the proof of principle experiment, five single NV centers with the same orientation in a NV center array were identified. After that, using the five single NV centers, microwave near field generated by a 20 {\mu}m-diameter Cu antenna was also measured by reading the fluourescence intensity change and Rabi frequency at different microwave source power. The gradient of near field microwave at sub-microscale can be resoluted by using arry of NV centers in our work. This work promotes the quantum sensing using arrays of NV centers.