Magnetic sensitivity enhancement via polarimetric excitation and detection of an ensemble of NV centers

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that using polarimetric excitation and detection techniques with NV centers significantly enhances magnetic field sensing sensitivity, doubling the improvement compared to previous methods.

Contribution

The study introduces a simple polarization-based method to improve NV center magnetic sensitivity by over two times, leveraging polarization properties of NV optical processes.

Findings

Over twofold increase in magnetic sensitivity

Implementation of a half-wave plate and polarizer improves detection

Polarimetric techniques enhance NV-based magnetometry

Abstract

The negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy center (NV) presents remarkable spin-dependent optical properties that make it an interesting tool for magnetic field sensing. In this paper we exploit the polarization properties of the NV center absorption and emission processes to improve the magnetic sensitivity of an ensemble of NV centers. By simply equipping the experimental set-up of a half-wave plate in the excitation path and a polarizer in the detection path we demonstrate an improvement larger than a factor of two on the NV center magnetic sensitivity.