Room-temperature control and electrical readout of individual nitrogen-vacancy nuclear spins

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the electrical readout of a single nitrogen-14 nuclear spin coupled to an NV center in diamond at room temperature, advancing scalable quantum information processing with nuclear spins.

Contribution

It introduces a method for electrical readout of individual nuclear spins in diamond, enabling scalable quantum devices with semiconductor-compatible structures.

Findings

Electrical readout of a single 14N nuclear spin achieved

Compatible with nanoscale electrode structures

Paves the way for large-scale diamond quantum devices

Abstract

Nuclear spins in semiconductors are leading candidates for quantum technologies, including quantum computation, communication, and sensing. Nuclear spins in diamond are particularly attractive due to their extremely long coherence lifetime. With the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centre, such nuclear qubits benefit from an auxiliary electronic qubit, which has enabled entanglement mediated by photonic links. The transport of quantum information by the electron itself, via controlled transfer to an adjacent centre or via the dipolar interaction, would enable even faster and smaller processors, but optical readout of arrays of such nodes presents daunting challenges due to the required sub-diffraction inter-site distances. Here, we demonstrate the electrical readout of a basic unit of such systems - a single 14N nuclear spin coupled to the NV electron. Our results provide the key ingredients for quantum gate operations and electrical readout of nuclear qubit registers, in a manner compatible with nanoscale electrode structures. This demonstration is therefore a milestone towards large-scale diamond quantum devices with semiconductor scalability.