Studies of how a nitrogen-vacancy center’s spin interacts with a surrounding 2D layer of spins could lead to new platforms for quantum metrology and simulation.
Diamond defects, nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in particular, serve as a rich playground for studies of spin physics. Over the past two decades, techniques for manipulating and reading out the quantum states of NVs with optical and microwave radiation have been fine-tuned for applications of these defects as magnetometers and qubits. An important research direction involves understanding and controlling how interactions with the environment can affect the NV’s quantum properties. Now two independent teams, led by Nathalie de Leon at Princeton University [1] and by Norman Yao at the University of California, Berkeley [2], respectively, have addressed this question for a configuration relevant to multiple applications: an NV center interacting with a 2D ensemble of spins formed by unpaired surface electrons or by impurities engineered within the diamond.
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