Experimental Acceleration of Spin Transition in Nitrogen-Vacancy Center

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a fast, robust control method for nitrogen-vacancy centers using invariant-based inverse engineering of shortcuts to adiabaticity, improving quantum manipulation speed and fidelity.

Contribution

The authors implement a space curve quantum control technique for invariant-based inverse engineering to accelerate and enhance the robustness of spin transitions in NV centers.

Findings

Achieved high-fidelity, fast spin transition control.

Demonstrated robustness against microwave detuning.

Outperformed traditional Raman schemes in speed and robustness.

Abstract

Shortcuts to adiabaticity~(STA) enables fast and robust coherent control of quantum system, which has been well placed in quantum technologies. In particular, inverse engineering STA provides much more freedom for the optimization of shortcut, which alleviates the complexity for experimental realization. Here, we implement a STA technique, known as invariant-based inverse engineering, to speed up the adiabatic control of the electron triplet ground state of a single nitrogen-vacancy~(NV) center. The microwave pulses to drive inversely engineered STA are obtained with space curve quantum control, where the evolution of spin transition is mapped to a three-dimensional closed space curve and the design of shortcut is obtained by optimization over the space curve. We demonstrate the fast and high-fidelity drive of dipole-forbidden transition between two spin sublevels of the ground state. Moreover, we demonstrate the robustness of the spin transition by introducing the detuning of driving microwave field. The acceleration and robustness is further confirmed by the comparison with two traditional Raman control schemes. Our results suggest invariant-based inverse engineering is powerful for fast and robust manipulation of NV system, and thus benefits quantum sensing and quantum computation based on the NV platform.