CPM Seminar

Optical signatures of silicon-based spins in diamond

Tina Müller

University of Cambridge

Colour centres in diamond have attracted wide interest in recent years for applications ranging from quantum information processing to high-resolution sensing of electromagnetic fields. The negatively charged silicon-vacancy (SiV) centre is a particularly promising candidate due to its exceptional brightness and high concentration of the emission into the zero-phonon line, which shows four individual transitions at liquid helium temperature. Crucial for applications in quantum enabled technologies is optical access to the SiV electronic spin, of which no optical signature has been observed yet. We first shed light on the SiV spin state by probing the response of the centre to a magnetic field, where we observe a splitting of the optical transitions consistent with a spin S=1/2 system. We then use the resonance fluorescence technique to selectively populate SiV excited states at finite magnetic fields, and show that the resulting fluorescence pattern carries clear signatures of the electronic spin.