Manipulating solid-state spin concentration through charge transport

Solid-state defects are attractive platforms for quantum sensing and simulation, e.g., in exploring many-body physics and quantum hydrodynamics. However, many interesting properties can be revealed only upon changes in the density of defects, which instead is usually fixed in material systems. Increasing the interaction strength by creating denser defect ensembles also brings more decoherence. Ideally one would like to control the spin concentration at will while keeping fixed decoherence effects. Here, we show that by exploiting charge transport, we can take some steps in this direction, while at the same time characterizing charge transport and its capture by defects. By exploiting the cycling process of ionization and recombination of NV centers in diamond, we pump electrons from the valence band to the conduction band. These charges are then transported to modulate the spin concentration by changing the charge state of material defects. By developing a wide-field imaging setup integrated with a fast single photon detector array, we achieve a direct and efficient characterization of the charge redistribution process by measuring the complete spectrum of the spin bath with micrometer-scale spatial resolution. We demonstrate a two-fold concentration increase of the dominant spin defects while keeping the T-2 of the NV center relatively unchanged, which also provides a potential experimental demonstration of the suppression of spin flip-flops via hyperfine interactions. Our work paves the way to studying many-body dynamics with temporally and spatially tunable interaction strengths in hybrid charge-spin systems.

Automated summary

Solid-state defects are attractive platforms for quantum sensing and simulation, but changes in density usually result in changes in spin. This study successfully controls the spin concentration while keeping fixed decoherence effects by exploiting charge transport, and characterizes the charge redistribution process using a wide-field imaging system.