Engineering shallow nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond holds the key to unlocking new advances in nanoscale quantum sensing. We find that the creation of near-surface NVs through delta doping during diamond growth allows for tunable control over both NV depth confinement (with a twofold improvement relative to low-energy ion implantation) and NV density, ultimately resulting in highly-sensitive single defects and ensembles with coherence limited by NV-NV interactions. Additionally, we demonstrate the utility of our shallow delta-doped NVs by imaging magnetism in few-layer CrSBr, a two-dimensional magnet. We anticipate that the control afforded by near-surface delta doping will enable new developments in NV quantum sensing from nanoscale NMR to entanglement-enhanced metrology.
@article{arxiv.2512.11242,
title = {Creation of Depth-Confined, Shallow Nitrogen-Vacancy Centers in Diamond With Tunable Density},
author = {Lillian B. Hughes Wyatt and Shreyas Parthasarathy and Isaac Kantor and Casey K. Kim and Lingjie Chen and Taylor A. Morrison and Jeffrey Ahlers and Kunal Mukherjee and Ania C. Bleszynski Jayich},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.11242},
year = {2026}
}