Systems of spins with strong dipolar interactions and controlled dimensionality enable new explorations in quantum sensing and simulation. In this work, we investigate the creation of strong dipolar interactions in a two-dimensional ensemble of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers generated via plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) on (111)-oriented diamond substrates. We find that diamond growth on the (111) plane yields high incorporation of spins, both nitrogen and NV centers, where the density of the latter is tunable via the miscut of the diamond substrate. Our process allows us to form dense, preferentially aligned, 2D NV ensembles with volume-normalized AC sensitivity down to ηAC = 810 pT um3/2 Hz−1/2. Furthermore, we show that (111) affords maximally positive dipolar interactions amongst a 2D NV ensemble, which is crucial for leveraging dipolar-driven entanglement schemes and exploring new interacting spin physics.
@article{arxiv.2404.10075,
title = {A strongly interacting, two-dimensional, dipolar spin ensemble in (111)-oriented diamond},
author = {Lillian B. Hughes and Simon A. Meynell and Weijie Wu and Shreyas Parthasarathy and Lingjie Chen and Zhiran Zhang and Zilin Wang and Emily J. Davis and Kunal Mukherjee and Norman Y. Yao and Ania C. Bleszynski Jayich},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.10075},
year = {2025}
}