Enhancing the spin properties of shallow implanted nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond by epitaxial overgrowth

Abstract

Scaling of diamond defect center based quantum registers relies on the ability to position nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers with high spatial resolution. Using ion implantation, shallow (<10 nm) NVs can be placed with accuracy below 20 nm, but generally show reduced spin properties compared to bulk NVs. We demonstrate the enhancement of spin properties for shallow implanted NVs using a diamond overgrowth technique. An increase of coherence times up to an order of magnitude (T2 = 250 μs) was achieved, ms decoherence times were realized using dynamical decoupling. This marks a further step towards achieving strong coupling among defects positioned with nm precision.