Fabrication of ¹⁵NV⁻ centers in diamond using a deterministic single ion implanter

Abstract

Abstract Nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers in diamond are a platform for several important quantum technologies, including sensing, communication and elementary quantum processors. In this letter we demonstrate the creation of NV centers by implantation using a deterministic single ion source. For this we sympathetically laser-cool single <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mmultiscripts> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi mathvariant="normal">N</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>+</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> <mml:mprescripts/> <mml:none/> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>15</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:mmultiscripts> </mml:math> molecular ions in a Paul trap and extract them at an energy of 5.9 keV. Subsequently the ions are focused with a lateral resolution of 121(35) nm and are implanted into a diamond substrate without any spatial filtering by apertures or masks. After high-temperature annealing, we detect the NV centers in a confocal microscope and determine a conversion efficiency of about 0.6%. The 15 NV centers are characterized by optically detected magnetic resonance on the hyperfine transition and coherence time.