Gigahertz Dynamics of a Strongly Driven Single Quantum Spin

• DOI: 10.1126/science.1181193
• Publication Date: 2009-11-20T03:15:06Z
• Authors: G. D. Fuchs; V. V. Dobrovitski; D. M. Toyli; F. J. Heremans; D. D. Awschalom
• Keywords: 0301 basic medicine; 0303 health sciences; 03 medical and health sciences; 0103 physical sciences; 01 natural sciences; 7. Clean energy

Quick Spin Flips

Quantum computation holds the tantalizing promise of vastly improving the efficiency of traditional computers. Among the many solid-state candidates for storing and manipulating quantum information, nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond are especially attractive because they can be used at room temperature and stay operational for milliseconds at a time. To use this coherence time efficiently, it is important to achieve fast manipulation of the spins in the system.

Fuchs et al.

(p. 1520 , published online 19 November; see the Perspective by

Gerardot and Öhberg

) used pulses of strong microwave magnetic field to probe the dynamics of single spins in a nitrogen vacancy center. In this “strong-driving” nonlinear regime, extremely quick spin flips of less than a nanosecond in duration were observed, offering the possibility that up to a million operations could be performed on a single spin during its coherence time.