Publications by authors named "Brendan J Shields"

The nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond is an attractive resource for the generation of remote entangled states owing to its optically addressable and long-lived electronic spin. However, its low native fraction of coherent photon emission, ~3%, undermines the achievable spin-photon entanglement rates. Here, we couple a nitrogen-vacancy center with a narrow extrinsically-broadened linewidth (159 MHz), hosted in a micron-thin membrane, to an open microcavity.

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The negatively charged silicon vacancy center (SiV) in diamond is a promising, yet underexplored candidate for single-spin quantum sensing at sub-kelvin temperatures and tesla-range magnetic fields. A key ingredient for such applications is the ability to perform all-optical, coherent addressing of the electronic spin of near-surface SiV centers. We present a robust and scalable approach for creating individual, ∼50 nm deep SiV with lifetime-limited optical linewidths in diamond nanopillars through an easy-to-realize and persistent optical charge-stabilization scheme.

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Neutral silicon vacancy centers (SiV^{0}) in diamond are promising candidates for quantum applications; however, stabilizing SiV^{0} requires high-purity, boron-doped diamond, which is not a readily available material. Here, we demonstrate an alternative approach via chemical control of the diamond surface. We use low-damage chemical processing and annealing in a hydrogen environment to realize reversible and highly stable charge state tuning in undoped diamond.

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Antiferromagnetic insulators are a prospective materials platform for magnonics, spin superfluidity, THz spintronics, and non-volatile data storage. A magnetomechanical coupling in antiferromagnets offers vast advantages in the control and manipulation of the primary order parameter yet remains largely unexplored. Here, we discover a new member in the family of flexoeffects in thin films of CrO.

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Antiferromagnets have recently emerged as attractive platforms for spintronics applications, offering fundamentally new functionalities compared with their ferromagnetic counterparts. Whereas nanoscale thin-film materials are key to the development of future antiferromagnetic spintronic technologies, existing experimental tools tend to suffer from low resolution or expensive and complex equipment requirements. We offer a simple, high-resolution alternative by addressing the ubiquitous surface magnetization of magnetoelectric antiferromagnets in a granular thin-film sample on the nanoscale using single-spin magnetometry in combination with spin-sensitive transport experiments.

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Quantum emitters in solids are being developed for a range of quantum technologies, including quantum networks, computing, and sensing. However, a remaining challenge is the poor photon collection due to the high refractive index of most host materials. Here we overcome this limitation by introducing monolithic parabolic reflectors as an efficient geometry for broadband photon extraction from quantum emitter and experimentally demonstrate this device for the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study focuses on the depolarization dynamics of dense dipolar interacting spins linked to nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond, revealing unexpectedly quick and density-dependent spin relaxation.
  • Researchers propose a microscopic model that incorporates long-range interactions, disorder, and dissipation to explain the observed nonexponential behavior, which aligns with existing experimental data.
  • The findings open up opportunities for conducting controlled experiments with ensembles of solid-state spins that are both long-lived and capable of strong interactions.
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A variety of nanoscale photonic, mechanical, electronic, and optoelectronic devices require scalable thin film fabrication. Typically, the device layer is defined by thin film deposition on a substrate of a different material, and optical or electrical isolation is provided by the material properties of the substrate or by removal of the substrate. For a number of materials this planar approach is not feasible, and new fabrication techniques are required to realize complex nanoscale devices.

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We propose and demonstrate a new approach for achieving enhanced light-matter interactions with quantum emitters. Our approach makes use of a plasmon resonator composed of defect-free, highly crystalline silver nanowires surrounded by patterned dielectric distributed Bragg reflectors. These resonators have an effective mode volume (V(eff)) 2 orders of magnitude below the diffraction limit and a quality factor (Q) approaching 100, enabling enhancement of spontaneous emission rates by a factor exceeding 75 at the cavity resonance.

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