A single Nitrogen Vacancy (NV) center hosted in a diamond nanocrystal is positioned at the extremity of a SiC nanowire. This novel hybrid system couples the degrees of freedom of two radically different systems, i.e. a nanomechanical oscillator and a
single quantum object. The dynamics of the nano-resonator is probed through time resolved nanocrystal fluorescence and photon correlation measurements, conveying the influence of a mechanical degree of freedom given to a non-classical photon emitter. Moreover, by immersing the system in a strong magnetic field gradient, we induce a magnetic coupling between the nanomechanical oscillator and the NV electronic spin, providing nanomotion readout through a single electronic spin. Spin-dependent forces inherent to this coupling scheme are essential in a variety of active cooling and entanglement protocols used in atomic physics, and should now be within the reach of nanomechanical hybrid systems.
Wheeler has strikingly illustrated the wave-particle duality by the delayed-choice thought experiment, in which the configuration of a 2-path interferometer is chosen after a single-photon light-pulsed has entered it. We present a quantitative theore
tical analysis of an experimental realization of Wheelers proposal.
We report an optical technique that yields an enhancement of single-molecule photostability, by greatly suppressing photobleaching pathways which involve photoexcitation from the triplet state. This is accomplished by dynamically switching off the ex
citation laser when a quantum-jump of the molecule to the triplet state is optically detected. This procedure leads to a lengthened single-molecule observation time and an increased total number of detected photons. The resulting improvement in photostability unambiguously confirms the importance of photoexcitation from the triplet state in photobleaching dynamics, and may allow the investigation of new phenomena at the single-molecule level.
