Scalable parallel measurement of individual nitrogen-vacancy centers

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable experimental platform that allows simultaneous measurement and manipulation of over 100 individually resolved nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond, enabling high-throughput quantum sensing with nanoscale resolution.

Contribution

The work introduces a method to address and measure multiple NV centers in parallel, surpassing previous limitations of single or ensemble measurements.

Findings

Measured over 100 NV centers simultaneously

Detected 5,778 unique pairwise correlations

Enabled high-throughput quantum sensing

Abstract

The nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond is a solid-state spin defect that has been widely adopted for quantum sensing and quantum information processing applications. Typically, experiments are performed either with a single isolated NV center or with an unresolved ensemble of many NV centers, resulting in a trade-off between measurement speed and spatial resolution or control over individual defects. In this work, we introduce an experimental platform that bypasses this trade-off by addressing multiple optically resolved NV centers in parallel. We perform charge- and spin-state manipulations selectively on multiple NV centers from within a larger set, and we manipulate and measure the electronic spin states of over 100 NV centers in parallel. We show that the high signal-to-noise ratio of the measurements enables the detection of shot-to-shot pairwise correlations between the spin states of 108 NV centers, corresponding to the simultaneous measurement of 5,778 unique correlation coefficients. We discuss how our platform can be scaled to parallel experiments with thousands of individually resolved NV centers. These results enable parallelized high-throughput sensing experiments that retain the nanoscale spatial resolution of single defects, and will thereby help to unlock advances in applications such as single-molecule NMR and characterization of integrated circuits. In addition, our approach to multiplexing provides a natural platform for the application of recently developed correlated sensing techniques.