Quantum electronics: Nitrogen-Vacancy centres in diamond and spin defects

Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centres are point defects in diamond that have spin one ground states. They many useful properties such as photoluminescence, long spin decoherence times and spin-selective intersystem crossing that allows optical initialisation or spin polarization of quantum states with green photons and optical readout using fluoresced red photons. The quantum states can be manipulated using pulsed microwaves at room temperature. NV centres in diamond are a promising platform for applications such as quantum computer, masers, quantum memory and quantum sensing. A continuous-wave room-temperature solid-state maser using optically pumped NV centres in diamond was demonstrated in 2018. This project will investigate this technology further and combines both theoretical and experimental work. Quantum optics theory will be used to develop models of electron and nuclear magnetic spin resonance and the dynamics of cavity-coupled NV spin ensembles. These models will be used to simulate novel diamond maser devices and used to inform novel experimental work: investigating the bad-cavity and strong-coupling regimes of cavity quantum electrodynamics, improving spectroscopic techniques such as optically detected magnetic resonance and developing new maser-based devices.