The strong driving regime occurs when a quantum two-level system is driven with an external field whose amplitude is greater or equal to the energy splitting between the systems states, and is typically identified with the breaking of the rotating wa
ve approximation (RWA). We report an experimental study, in which the spin of a single nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond is strongly driven with microwave (MW) fields of arbitrary polarization. We measure the NV center spin dynamics beyond the RWA, and characterize the limitations of this technique for generating high-fidelity quantum gates. Using circularly polarized MW fields, the NV spin can be harmonically driven in its rotating frame regardless of the field amplitude, thus allowing rotations around arbitrary axes. Our approach can effectively remove the RWA limit in quantum-sensing schemes, and assist in increasing the number of operations in QIP protocols.
The loss of coherence is one of the main obstacles for the implementation of quantum information processing. The efficiency of dynamical decoupling schemes, which have been introduced to address this problem, is limited itself by the fluctuations in
the driving fields which will themselves introduce noise. We address this challenge by introducing the concept of concatenated continuous dynamical decoupling, which can overcome not only external magnetic noise but also noise due to fluctuations in driving fields. We show theoretically that this approach can achieve relaxation limited coherence times, and demonstrate experimentally that already the most basic implementation of this concept yields an order of magnitude improvement of the decoherence time for the electron spin of nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond. The proposed scheme can be applied to a wide variety of other physical systems including, trapped atoms and ions, quantum dots, and may be combined with other quantum technologies challenges such as quantum sensing and quantum information processing.
Realization of devices based on quantum laws might lead to building processors that outperform their classical analogues and establishing unconditionally secure communication protocols. Solids do usually present a serious challenge to quantum coheren
ce. However, owing to their spin-free lattice and low spin orbit coupling, carbon materials and particularly diamond are suitable for hosting robust solid state quantum registers. We show that scalable quantum logic elements can be realized by exploring long range magnetic dipolar coupling between individually addressable single electron spins associated with separate color centers in diamond. Strong distance dependence of coupling was used to characterize the separation of single qubits 98 A with unprecedented accuracy (3 A) close to a crystal lattice spacing. Our demonstration of coherent control over both electron spins, conditional dynamics, selective readout as well as switchable interaction, opens the way towards a room temperature solid state scalable quantum register. Since both electron spins are optically addressable, this solid state quantum device operating at ambient conditions provides a degree of control that is currently available only for atomic systems.
