Due to its superior coherent and optical properties at room temperature, the nitrogen-vacancy (N-V ) center in diamond has become a promising quantum probe for nanoscale quantum sensing. However, the application of N-V containing nanodiamonds to quantum sensing suffers from their relatively poor spin coherence times. Here we demonstrate energy efficient protection of N-V spin coherence in nanodiamonds using concatenated continuous dynamical decoupling, which exhibits excellent performance with less stringent microwave power requirement. When applied to nanodiamonds in living cells we are able to extend the spin coherence time by an order of magnitude to the T1-limit of up to 30μs. Further analysis demonstrates concomitant improvements of sensing performance which shows that our results provide an important step towards in vivo quantum sensing using N-V centers in nanodiamond.
@article{arxiv.1710.10744,
title = {Protecting quantum spin coherence of nanodiamonds in living cells},
author = {Q. -Y. Cao and P. -C. Yang and M. -S. Gong and M. Yu and A. Retzker and M. B. Plenio and C. Müller and N. Tomek and B. Naydenov and L. P. McGuinness and F. Jelezko and J. -M. Cai},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.10744},
year = {2020}
}