Photonic structures in diamond are key to most of its application in quantum technology. Here, we demonstrate tapered nano-waveguides structured directly onto the diamond substrate hosting shallow-implanted nitrogen vacancy (NV) centers. By optimization based on simulations and precise experimental control of the geometry of these pillar-shaped nano-waveguides, we achieve a net photon flux up to ~ 1.7⋅106/s. This presents the brightest monolithic bulk diamond structure based on single NV centers so far. We observe no impact on excited state lifetime and electronic spin dephasing time (T2) due to the nanofabrication process. Possessing such high brightness with low background in addition to preserved spin quality, this geometry can improve the current nanomagnetometry sensitivity ~ 5 times. In addition, it facilitates a wide range of diamond defects-based magnetometry applications. As a demonstration, we measure the temperature dependency of T1 relaxation time of a single shallow NV center electronic spin. We observe the two-phonon Raman process to be negligible in comparison to the dominant two-phonon Orbach process.
@article{arxiv.1409.0027,
title = {Nano-engineered Diamond Waveguide as a Robust Bright Platform for Nanomagnetometry Using Shallow Nitrogen Vacancy Centers},
author = {S. Ali Momenzadeh and Rainer J. Stöhr and Felipe Favaro de Oliveira and Andreas Brunner and Andrej Denisenko and Sen Yang and Friedemann Reinhard and Jörg Wrachtrup},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.0027},
year = {2015}
}